Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War 9781472569820, 9781474206051, 9781350199590

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Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Also Available from Bloomsbury: Alcohol in the Early Modern World: A Cultural History, Edited by Ann Tlusty T&T Clark Handbook to Early Christian Meals in the Greco-Roman World, Edited by Soham Al-Suadi and Peter Ben-Smit The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture, Edited by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato

Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War Edited by Deborah Toner

Bloomsbury Academic Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This edition published in 2023 Copyright © Deborah Toner and contributors, 2021 Deborah Toner has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image: A busy afternoon at the York Minster pub in Soho, London, October 1941 (Photo by Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. library of congress control Number: 2021938956 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-6982-0 978-1-3502-1771-3 PB: ePDF: 978-1-3501-9959-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-9960-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

Contents List of Illustrations

vi



Introduction  Deborah Toner

1

1

Production  Andrew McMichael

21

2

Consumption  James Kneale

43

3

Regulation and Prohibition  Dan Malleck

65

4

Commerce  Gina Hames

87

5

Medicine and Health  Sarah W. Tracy

109

6

Gender and Sexuality  Stella Moss

133

7

Religion and Ideology  Paul Townend and Deborah Toner

153

8

Cultural Representations  Deborah Toner

175

Notes Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

194 196 219 221

Illustrations Figures Chapter 1 1.1 Brewing, Louis Pasteur

25

1.2 Malthouse superintendent checking temperature at Pabst brewery, c. 1944

30

1.3 George Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery

31

1.4 Brewery Joseph Schlitz, 1900

33

1.5 Submersion of vineyards to fight against the phylloxera, France, 1939

34

1.6 Whisky in Scotland, c. 1940

39

Chapter 2 2.1 Outside a public house, London, c. 1903

49

2.2 Drinkers in the public bar of an English public house, 1938

51

2.3 “Saint Monday in the Prater wine tavern,” 1818

54

2.4 Exterior of the Horseshoe & Wheatsheaf public house, Southwark, London, 1898

57

2.5 “Les débits de boissons au Champ-de-Mars,” Paris, 1879

58

2.6 “Mexico: Scenes before a Pulquería in the City of Mexico”

60

Chapter 3 3.1 Inside the French café “L’Assommoir,” c. 1900

67

3.2 The prohibition of absinthe in Switzerland

69

3.3 Neal Dow, the Mayor of Portland, Maine, c. 1851

71

3.4 The Redfern Inn, Etterbury, Carlisle

76

3.5 Wayne Bidwell Wheeler, Anti-Saloon League, 1883

79

3.6 Customers at the counter in a liquor store in Moscow, Russia, c. 1950

82

Chapter 4 4.1 Anheuser Busch brewery, St Louis, Missouri

89

4.2 Royal Blend whisky advertisement

92

4.3 Scotch whisky “White Label” John Dewar advertisement

93

4.4 Duminy & Co. champagne advertisement

95

4.5 Canning process at the Acton factory, 1937

101

4.6 Schlitz beer advertisement, 1904

103

Chapter 5 5.1 Gilbert and Parsons “Hygienic Whiskey for Medicinal Use,” advertisement, 1860

112

5.2 Absinthe versus alcohol, c. 1900

115

5.3 Vin Mariani: “The original French Coca Wine,” advertisement, 1893

118

5.4 The New York State Inebriate Asylum, Binghamton

123

5.5 Man speaking at Alcoholics Anonymous. c. 1950

124

5.6 “The Keeley Cure: For liquor and drug use,” advertisement, 1907

129

Chapter 6 6.1 Cowboys drink and play card games in a saloon, c. 1890

137

6.2 Gambling Den, c. 1875

139

6.3 Temperance movement: “Ohio whiskey war,” 1874

141

6.4 Patrons of The Crown public house, London, 1947

145

6.5 Men and women drinking and dining in the cocktail lounge, 1944

147

6.6 Pacific Street, San Francisco, California, c. 1930s

149

Chapter 7 7.1 Total Abstinence Society pledge card, 1845

158

7.2 Plate II of George Cruikshank’s “The Bottle,” 1847

161

7.3 Plate VI of George Cruikshank’s “The Bottle,” 1847

162

7.4 “L’absinthe allegory,” 1883

164

7.5 Beat the enemy of the cultural revolution poster, 1930

169

Illustrations vii

Chapter 8 8.1 Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, 1941

180

8.2 L’Assommoir theatrical poster, 1877

182

8.3 Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner, José Ferrer, Tyrone Power, and Eddie Albert acting in The Sun Also Rises, 1957

185

8.4 “The Absinthe Drinker,” by Edgar Degas, 1876

190

8.5 “The Night Café at Arles,” by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

191

Table Chapter 2 2.1 Alcohol consumption, liters of absolute alcohol per capita, 1844–5 to 1954

viii Illustrations

46



INTRODUCTION DEBORAH TONER

The period 1850 to 1950 was transformative for the history of alcohol around the world. Important shifts in the economic, social, and cultural status of alcohol had already been underway from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but these would coalesce and solidify in the next hundred years. Concerns about the various problems alcohol consumption—and particularly drunkenness—could cause were not new in the 1800s, but these had generally been counterbalanced, even overshadowed, by recognition of alcohol’s medical, social, and spiritual benefits. Such positive views were progressively displaced during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth in many parts of the world. The increasing accessibility of cheap, non-alcoholic beverages undermined long-held assumptions that alcohol was a necessity and made it possible to see alcohol consumption as a recreational choice. Powerful anti-alcohol movements took hold. Broad anxieties about rapid social change, industrialization, urbanization, and national development manifested as fears about the impact of alcohol on society, particularly in relation to the drinking habits of the urban working classes, the poor, and non-white, imperial subjects. Medical, psychiatric, and social science researchers questioned the long-accepted therapeutic and dietary necessity of alcoholic beverages. They theorized about a range of alcohol-related pathologies—including the new concept of alcoholism—as being both cause and consequence of criminality, insanity, and racial degeneration. Taken together, these developments placed alcohol at the center of major historical processes during the modern era: industrialization, state-building, colonialism, and war. This volume examines alcohol production, consumption, regulation, and commerce, alongside the gendered, medical, religious, ideological, and cultural ideas and practices that surrounded alcohol. Each chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of major changes in these different aspects of alcohol’s place in society during the period 1850 to 1950 and a historiographical synthesis of this rapidly growing field. Our global framework shows how the history of alcohol addresses key challenges for historians of the modern world: bringing geographically distinct historiographies into dialogue, combining economic and socio-cultural approaches, and analyzing the role of individual states within and alongside broader global formations (Berg 2013: 5–17). In doing so, the volume demonstrates not only the important connections between industrialization, empire-building, and the growth of the nation-state, but also how diverse actors and communities built, contested, and resisted those processes around the world. Scholarship on the history of alcohol during the age of industry, empire, and war is very extensive, although it has tended to concentrate on several major issues and areas: the rise of temperance and prohibition, the medicalization of problem drinking, and the

impact of modernity on social norms of alcohol consumption. Temperance movements and ­prohibitionist legislation, particularly, have been the subject of much research, and rightly so. They marked a significant historical departure in the discussion and regulation of alcohol’s place in society, as well as having long-lasting effects that transcended the life-span of any one organization or piece of legislation. This is a point worth dwelling on, as the widespread misconceptions that surround the period of national prohibition in the United States (1920– 33), as unpopular, unusual, and wholly unsuccessful, continue to inhibit how ­historians at large engage with histories of alcohol in other contexts. Judging prohibition to have been the work of a small group of puritanical American fanatics, for instance, has allowed the temperance movement to be dismissed as a fringe concern, in comparison to the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements, and obscures the significance of anti-alcohol debates that were happening globally (McGirr 2016: xiv–xvi). Temperance organizations in fact often shared goals and members with those campaigning for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Indeed, in this introduction I argue that efforts to restrict or eliminate alcohol’s influence in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australasia, and the multiple interest groups involved in promoting and resisting this process, reveal the variety of social and political responses to industrialization and urbanization around the world, the development and application of new forms of state power, and how ideas of class and racial difference underpinned that power. Historians of alcohol have also focused on the emergence and spread of medicalized understandings of problem drinking and associated concerns about public health. Until the nineteenth century, habitual drunkenness was largely understood as a moral failing. Across the nineteenth century, and gathering apace in its second half, habitual drunkenness and other drinking behaviors were pathologized. New terms like inebriety, dipsomania, addiction, and alcoholism diagnosed certain drinking patterns and practices as medical or psychiatric problems. Moral judgments and social prejudices were embedded within these new concepts, which varied in their definitions and applications from place to place, and belief in the positive medical benefits of at least some alcoholic drinks remained fairly strong. Nevertheless, these medicalization processes gave rise to conflicting views of problem drinking with lasting legacies. In some places, heavy drinking, often referred to as “alcoholism,” was studied and treated within the context of degeneration theory and, later, eugenics. This located the source of the problem in the inherited characteristics of the individual. Elsewhere, and sometimes overlapping with this, were understandings of alcoholism as a product of unhealthy social environments, and alcohol itself, or specific types of alcohol, as inherently addictive. By the middle of the twentieth century, Alcoholics Anonymous, established in 1935, helped to popularize a version of the “disease” concept of alcoholism that in many ways combined moral and medical ideas about problem drinking (Levine 1985; Sournia 1990; Piccato 1997; Tracy 2005). Scholarship examining the relationship between alcohol, modernity, class, religion, gender, race, and ethnicity adds greater nuance to our understanding of these long-term trends toward anti-alcohol activism, prohibitionist legislation, and medicalization. A far greater diversity of actors participated in anti-alcohol movements than is typically assumed, encompassing Mexican Catholics, Indian nationalists, Turkish doctors, and Russian socialists, in addition to the Protestant missionaries with whom temperance is most often associated. Racial ideologies legitimizing colonialism shaped discriminatory policies of prohibition in

2 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

North America, Latin America, Africa, and Australasia, which were contested and resisted in a variety of different ways. Even as it was attacked from several directions, alcohol also continued to be important to sociability, community, and identity. Across the United States, Britain, Europe, Latin America, and parts of Africa, urbanization led to a strong connection between drinking places, masculinity, and working-class organization. Women’s increasing roles in public life in the early twentieth century helped to transform attitudes toward women’s public drinking (Powers 1998; Heron 2005; Moss 2015). Such research reminds us not to fall into the trap of examining alcohol in the same way that dominant discourse did from 1850 to 1950: solely as a problem. In assessing how alcohol was connected to industrialization, empire, and war, this introduction proposes a new global framework that is vital to understanding how deeply alcohol was involved in central processes shaping the modern world. Industrialization transformed alcohol production and commerce into big business, reshaping consumption habits. Diverse and international anti-alcohol movements developed in reaction to these changes. Empires were partly built through alcohol, in both economic and ideological terms. Yet ­alcohol production, trade, and consumption were also sites for anti-colonial resistance. Changes to alcohol regulations in the period of the First World War bring into sharp relief the increased intent and reach of state power to monitor and police its citizens, the increasing legitimization of that power through nationalism, and its interaction with public health discourses. Alcohol, the various rules, norms, and concepts surrounding its place in society, and the people, spaces, and institutions it brought into contact, are fundamental to understanding the making of the modern world.

Industrialization The intensification of industrialization across the Western world after 1850 supported, and was supported by, major changes in the production, trade, and consumption of alcohol. As Jeffrey Pilcher has noted, throughout this period alcohol was a “pioneering sector of early industrialization” and “remained at the forefront of innovation and expansion” (2015: 165). New technologies and scientific advances in brewing, fermenting, and distilling facilitated major increases in the production of beers, wines, and spirits in the United States, Britain, and parts of Europe. As Andrew McMichael and Gina Hames explain in this volume, the adoption of steam-powered mills, mechanized bottling systems, metal storage containers, artificial refrigeration, continuous distillation techniques, and improved understandings of the biochemical processes involved in fermentation created economies of scale previously unworkable in the alcohol industry. The brewing, distilling, and to a lesser extent wine industries consolidated into fewer, larger-scale enterprises, marked by vertical integration: major commercial breweries, for instance, often owned and controlled substantial elements of their supply chain, as well as bottling, packaging, transport, and retail infrastructure. Industrialization also financed and was driven by improved transport infrastructure, especially railroads, which connected these economies of scale in the alcohol industry to new, mass markets in growing urban centers. Mass production meant that beers, wines, and spirits became much more affordable, while improved preservation techniques, and rail and shipping connections, made them more widely available both within national markets and internationally. In developing new, mass-produced, lighter beers, with the use of hops

Introduction 3

helping to preserve them for long-distance transport, the new center of the British brewing industry, Burton-on-Trent, exported India Pale Ale throughout the British empire, as well as to parts of Latin America and Japan. Bavarian-style lager beer was the real winner of all these processes, becoming globally dominant in the beer industry, as German immigrants led the expansion of the US brewing industry and their lagers changed tastes of consumers as far afield as British India (Pilcher 2015: 166). The greater interconnectivity of producers and markets was not all positive for the alcohol industry, however, as it was one of the factors that led to an outbreak in France in the 1870s of vine disease phylloxera, which wreaked havoc upon wine production in France, before spreading to Italy, Spain, California, Peru, Australia, and Southern Africa (Phillips 2014: 178; Olsson 2018: 30). Hames also shows that as production expanded and as fewer, larger companies dominated the alcohol industry, advertising became increasingly important for gaining a competitive edge. Often, it constructed images that obscured the increasingly standardized, technological, and affordable nature of industrialized alcohol products. Brand images frequently drew on claims to authenticity rooted in romantic nostalgia for a national or regional past, traditional or historic production methods, or the product’s origin in an immigrant homeland. Marketing some brands as markers of distinction, luxury, and sophistication was another common strategy, in some cases supported by legal frameworks recognizing the special characteristics of products connected to specific regions. The French appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) of 1908, for instance, established that only wines from the regions of Champagne, Cognac, Bordeaux, Banyuls, and Armagnac could be labeled as such to protect their reputation as high-end, quality products. Newly industrializing countries, such as Argentina and Mexico, which gained their independence from the Spanish empire in the early nineteenth century, saw similar developments, albeit on a smaller scale, with a symbiosis between the development of a manufacturing sector in general and industrialization of the alcohol sector. From the 1880s to the 1920s, Argentine wine grew from an artisan sector to a large-scale industry. This was made possible by the construction of a railway from the main wine-producing province of Mendoza to growing urban markets, and by the rapid expansion of those markets, particularly Buenos Aires, which became home to the majority of the 7 million immigrants, mostly Spanish and Italian, who came to Argentina between 1847 and 1939 to work in the expanding manufacturing economy. These immigrant communities consumed 80 percent of Argentine wine by the 1910s and early marketing approaches were shaped accordingly. Like advertising trends elsewhere—for instance the US lager beer industry which often referenced the German immigrant homelands—Argentine winemakers used labels evocative of Spain and Italy. However, contrary to dominant marketing approaches in Britain, the United States, and Europe that romanticized traditional production methods, Argentine wine labels explicitly referenced factory-buildings and production lines, creating a positive narrative around the efficiency, modernity, and affordability of their wine industry (Hanway 2014: 91; Stein 2014: 210–15). Mexico’s newly developing beer and tequila industries combined similar images of modernity with referents to the ancient Aztec past in promoting their products at home and abroad. Cervecería Cuauhtémoc, named for the last Aztec emperor, began beer production in northern Mexico in 1891. Steam-powered mills, imported technical expertise, and an expanding rail network enabled the company to grow rapidly and cater to export as well

4 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

as domestic markets from the outset (Hibino 1992; Bunker 1997: 231–3). Leading tequila distilleries, owned by the Sauza and Cuervo families, introduced modern steam-powered machines, expanded land-holdings in the 1870s and 1880s, and took advantage of the railroad to target export markets. Like Canadian, US, and British distillers, Sauza and Cuervo sought international recognition for their products to market them as luxury goods, markers of taste and sophistication, with considerable success: American judges gave Mexican spirits twenty-two awards at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, including a gold medal certificate for Sauza’s “Mezcal Brandy” (Gaytán 2014: 39–40; Orozco 2014: 187–91).1 It is clear, therefore, that industrialization transformed alcohol production and commerce from 1850 to 1950, and not only in the most heavily industrialized parts of the world. As the chapters by James Kneale and Stella Moss explore further, industrialization also shaped consumption practices, not just overall rates of consumption, but also who consumed alcohol, when, where, in what form, and across social contexts. Industrialization afforded more disposable income for working people at the same time as mass-produced spirits, wines, and beers became cheaper and more accessible (Pilcher 2015: 165). Yet, except for France and Italy, in most countries for which we have available data, overall per capita consumption of alcohol between 1850 and 1950 either declined precipitously or was markedly lower than it had been in the preceding century. This general trend masks considerable fluctuations in rates of consumption between 1850 and 1950, first rising and then falling, and in many cases was due to the increasing popularity of beer over spirits, since the figures are generally measured in terms of absolute alcohol. Nevertheless, the overall trend is noteworthy both as a counter to contemporary perceptions advanced by anti-alcohol movements that drinking was spiraling out of control in this period and, perhaps, as a measure of their effectiveness in persuading some constituencies to drink less. The gradual solidification of more regimented working practices, particularly in urban, industrialized areas, and new regulatory regimes partly driven by anti-alcohol movements, shaped patterns of alcohol consumption. In many places, this meant less drinking throughout the day as a dietary norm, and the rise of drinking as a leisure activity in and of itself. Specialized drinking places, catering to distinct social classes, became increasingly common in industrial towns and cities. For instance, the greater break between work and leisure time, and the greater availability of free time and disposable income for working people, helped to spur the development of saloons in American cities as spaces for working-class sociability and recreation. These bars were often used as the headquarters of labor unions, which held official meetings in them as well as social events, at which bands sponsored by the Industrial Workers of the World played satirical, pro-worker, and anti-employer songs. Saloons also provided essential social services for workers new to city life, having either migrated from rural areas or other countries. Local political magnates who relied on personal ties and exchanges of favors for votes (often referred to as political machines) commonly based their headquarters in saloons or had close ties with saloonkeepers. By promising to vote for the political machine, workers could expect to call on them in times of hardship, whether to help find a job, get a cash loan, or be supported in court; this was all mediated through saloons and saloonkeepers. Although female workers participated to an extent, this pattern of saloon-going during workers’ leisure time often created spaces in which specifically masculine, working-class values and identities could be performed and expressed (Rosenzweig 1991; Powers 1994; Powers 1998).

Introduction 5

Similar relationships between specialized urban drinking venues, working-class organization, and masculinity developed across a wide variety of different places. Haine has shown that cafés were integral to working-class culture and politics in nineteenth-century France. Even as working-class communities built new institutions like unions, labor exchanges, and popular universities in the early twentieth century, cafés remained important sites in times of strikes and for organizing demonstrations and were systematically used by Communist groups between the First and Second World Wars (Haine 2006: 135–40). In Argentina, as the city of Buenos Aires rapidly transformed through immigration and industrialization, the number of cafés and bars doubled to serve these largely immigrant, working-class communities. Arrested workers—Spanish, Brazilian, Argentine, Chinese, Italian, and French—sometimes strategically pleaded drunkenness in testimonies to deny culpability for certain crimes and to perform manliness. This demographic diversity is striking since it indicates the development of a shared set of working-class, masculine norms in the drinking places of Buenos Aires across ethnic and racial lines (Gayol 1993). While many scholars have thereby emphasized the solidarity that grew out of urban drinking places, many contemporaries viewed urban, working-class drinking cultures as the source of most social ills, as discussed in the chapters by Sarah Tracy, Paul Townend, and Deborah Toner. Temperance movements emerged in the United States, Britain, British Canada, Scandinavia, and elsewhere partly in response to the changing fabric of urbanizing, industrializing societies: their concerns often focused on reforming the drinking habits of urban workers and the poor, or on demonstrating cultures of middle-class restraint and sobriety in opposition to them. French and German temperance movements in the 1870s and 1880s focused on the dangers of cheap, mass-produced, industrial alcohols such as absinthe and schnapps, urging workers to return to what they viewed as more natural beverages like wine and beer. The influential American organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, often explicitly located drinking problems in the United States as the preserve of poor immigrants, calling for a halt to immigration as well as for anti-alcohol education programs and restrictions on licensing. In 1892, its leader Frances Willard urged Congress to prohibit the “influx into our land of more of the scum of the Old World, until we have educated those who are here” (Phillips 2014: 195). Before turning its attentions to the campaign for national prohibition via a constitutional amendment around 1913, the Anti-Saloon League, formed in the 1890s, concentrated all its considerable propagandizing and legislative efforts on attacking saloons, the heart of urban, immigrant, working-class communities in the United States. Rod Phillips has emphasized how the broader socio-cultural conditions created by industrialization were key to this outpouring of anti-alcohol sentiment. According to many middle-class temperance advocates, who claimed self-discipline, moderation, and rationality to be distinctively middle-class virtues, “Alcohol led drinkers to lose control of their minds and bodies, and they made irrational decisions that led them to embrace poverty, indolence, crime, immorality, and impiety. Stop the consumption of alcohol, the argument went, and you would solve most of the problems that bedeviled workers and the poor and that threatened social stability” (Phillips 2014: 206). However, the image of the temperance movement that can emerge from this perspective, as a predominantly white, middle-class, Protestant concern, is overly simplistic, as the chapters by Townend and Toner show. Temperance organizations attracted major support from Catholic communities in Ireland, North America, and some Australian colonies; orthodox

6 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Christians and various sectarian groups in Russia; and among various Indigenous peoples that Protestant missionaries sought to Christianize. Nationalist liberationist movements in Ireland, India, and Poland connected temperance to their cause. Socialists, working-class communities, and organized labor movements in Britain, America, Australia, France, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere drove temperance campaigns as part of their critique of capitalist inequality. Socialists often interpreted alcohol as a tool for the exploitation of workers: drinking not only kept workers in a state of impoverishment, they argued, but was also likely to divert them from participating in organized labor movements, protests, and political activism. Literary works from Mexico, Spain, and France depicted alcoholism as a new kind of medical condition that especially afflicted working people because it was the product of urbanization and industrialization. In these portraits, workers were either driven to drink by the oppressive conditions of their lives, echoing socialist thinkers, or, revealing a more conservative outlook, as a consequence of being untethered from traditional values, communities, and institutions. The different trajectories of temperance in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Mexico in the early twentieth century reveal how the global anti-alcohol movement, often spear-headed by the international activism of Protestant American missionaries, was taken up for different reasons and by very different constituencies experiencing profound social and political change. Both Bulgaria and Turkey emerged as nation-states from the long break-up of the Ottoman empire; Bulgaria became independent following the 1877–8 Russo-Turkish War and Turkey became independent with the dissolution of the Ottoman empire in 1922. Urbanization and the proliferation of public drinking places in some cities toward the end of the nineteenth century gave rise to increasing concerns about the corrupting effects of modernity, and belie the popular misconception that the formal proscription of alcohol consumption in the Muslim faith has meant that the history of alcohol in the Islamic World was less contested than elsewhere (Matthee 2014: 114–16; Evered and Evered 2016: 50–2; Kamenov 2019). In Mexico, meanwhile, concerns about alcohol consumption amongst the Indigenous, mixed race, and poor population had long occupied Mexican elites, government officials, and Catholic Church leaders during the colonial period (c. 1521–1810) and throughout the nineteenth century following Mexico’s independence. Beginning in 1910, a political crisis sparked more than a decade of war that produced a socialist constitution in 1917 and a revolutionary government seeking to overhaul structural inequalities through land reform, industrial development, and education that included temperance as a strong component (Pierce 2009: 151–80; Toner 2015a). Bulgaria’s anti-alcohol movement started to develop under the influence of American Protestant missionaries in the 1890s. Over the next three decades, Bulgarian doctors, educators, and politicians shifted the contours of the temperance movement to encompass both socialist and eugenicist perspectives. This shift was shaped by international scientific research, particularly the Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel’s interpretation of how alcohol abuse caused degeneration by poisoning the germ plasm of conceiving parents, and by the damaging legacy of decades of military losses. Temperance publications of the 1920s and 1930s popularized eugenicist theories about the degenerational consequences of alcoholism as a major social problem and called for greater state intervention to address it. Socialist voices within the movement argued capitalism produced alcoholism both by creating cheap, industrial drinks and by impoverishing working people en masse, so they

Introduction 7

called for improved public health, welfare, and educational provisions. Nikolay Kamenov has characterized the state response as one of positive eugenics, creating maternal and child health care services to promote reproduction among demographic groups deemed physically and mentally healthy and, above all, free from hereditary disease. The 1929 Law for National Health did, however, contain a commitment to negative eugenics—preventing the reproduction of those deemed unfit—although this did not translate into aggressive measures like sterilization (Kamenov 2017: 125–35). In Turkey (Anatolia while still part of the Ottoman empire), American missionaries played a preliminary role in the development of temperance activism in the late nineteenth century, mostly working with Christian communities within the empire. The World League Against Alcoholism, created by the Anti-Saloon League in 1919, campaigned for stricter application of the Islamic religious prohibition against alcohol consumption. However, the debates within Turkey’s Grand National Assembly, which introduced a total prohibition on the production, sale, and public consumption of alcohol in 1920, reveal a much more complex set of motivations. Progressivists concerned with the impact of alcohol on public health joined Islamic supporters of prohibition. Turkey’s first anti-alcohol organization, the Green Crescent Temperance Society, established in 1920, likewise represented a coalition between religious figures, generally seen as socially and politically conservative, and medical personnel aligned with more progressive and secular politics. The prohibition law only narrowly passed and was short-lived, being reversed by 1924. Arguments against prohibition in 1920 centered on the financial value of alcohol taxation and the benefits for social stability of respecting the rights of non-Muslim minorities and foreigners to consume, produce, or sell alcohol. These arguments became more powerful following the tumultuous events of the early 1920s, in which the Ottoman empire collapsed, the Turkish Republic was declared, and Islamic law was abolished. The Green Crescent Society remained influential, though, continuing to shape government policy toward alcohol with a greater emphasis on public health until the mid-twentieth century (Evered and Evered 2016; Evered 2019). The World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU) started to report on organized temperance activity in Mexico, emanating from Protestant church communities and American missionaries, in the 1890s, charting the establishment of eleven union branches across seven cities by 1897 (WWCTU 1890: 26; WWCTU 1895: 162; WWCTU 1897: 142–4). Addie Fields, a leading figure of the WWCTU who made several trips to Mexico, also helped to establish the first national body, the Mexican Temperance Society, in 1903. Its board of directors included Mexican physicians and social scientists, for whom alcohol abuse and its connection to poor health, mental illness, crime, and other social problems had been a major concern since the 1870s. The society’s early campaigns, lobbying the municipal government of Mexico City to tighten restrictions on popular drinking places, likewise revealed a continuation of the preoccupation with lower-class drinking behaviors that had animated anti-alcohol debates in Mexico for decades (“Sociedad Mexicana de Temperancia” 1903; Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal 1907). In Mexico’s revolutionary years, however, especially between 1920 and 1940, temperance expanded beyond this elite group of intellectuals and policy-makers to encompass major state-sponsored programs and grass-roots involvement. The National Committee for the Struggle Against Alcoholism was formed in 1929 by “representatives from various governmental departments, workers and peasant leagues, and private groups with an interest in temperance,” and this body encouraged the

8 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

establishment of auxiliary, grass-roots groups led by women, teachers, workers, and churchgoers (Pierce 2009: 158). The campaign was animated by the revolutionary goals of social transformation through land reform, education, and economic development, and of molding Mexicans into “New Men and Women as sober, healthy, and rational individuals” (Pierce 2009: 152). They also sought to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church, whose calendar of religious festivals they blamed for fostering drunkenness and inhibiting loyalty to the nationstate. Complementing more aggressive taxation and regulation systems implemented by the government, these organizations launched mass education programs, making temperance part of school curricula and communicating temperance ideas through leaflets, radio interviews, parades, Anti-Alcohol Days, temperance conferences, and even some anti-alcohol movies. Although there was popular opposition to the anti-alcohol movement, there was also substantial popular involvement, with anti-alcohol activists going on to join movements in favor of women’s suffrage, land reform, and secularization (Pierce 2009: 151–80). The three cases of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Mexico illustrate that while Protestant missionaries and American temperance organizations often contributed to the formalization of specific anti-alcohol bodies around the world, the ideas and policies linked to temperance developed in their own distinct directions. As in the Anglophone world, some of these developments were linked to urbanization, industrialization, and reactions—either socialist or conservative—against these changes. But the development and impact of temperance movements were also deeply rooted in local geopolitical changes and in class, ethnic, and/or religious divisions. What they have in common with each other and many other cases was the development of a state that was increasingly willing, if not always able, to shape its citizens’ private lives, bodies, and social behaviors.

Empire and Colonialism Industrialization shaped new practices of alcohol production, trade, regulation, and consumption, which in turn gave rise to increased concerns about alcohol’s effect on society. Both processes were accelerated by the global expansion of European and American imperialism. Alcohol became central to the economics of empire, and to the racial ideologies that legitimized imperialism. The internationalization of anti-alcohol activism and regulation was also driven by imperialism. However, to suggest that the relationship between alcohol and empire was solely about the creation of relations of dependency between imperial powers and colonial subjects is too simplistic (Mills and Barton 2007: 11–12). Alcohol production, trade, and consumption could also be important sites for resistance to colonialism. Difficulties of enforcement surrounding alcohol regulations and the unintended consequences of some policies reveal the significant limits of colonial state-building. As detailed in the chapters by McMichael, Hames, and Kneale, alcohol was increasingly used as a trading commodity, a source of taxation revenue, and as a form of currency for European powers in their colonization of Africa and Asia. This was also the case in North America, as both the United States and Canada extended their domination over Indigenous nations. This fueled the expansion and integration of alcohol markets around the world. In the nineteenth century, for instance, rum production and commerce became truly global. The Indian Ocean territories of Madagascar, Réunion Island, and Mauritius were exporting rum to India, Australia, and East Africa by the nineteenth century. Following the abolition of

Introduction 9

slavery in the British and French Caribbean in the first half of the nineteenth century, plantations increasingly shifted focus from sugar to rum production, in the face of rising labor costs and intense competition in sugar markets. Rum accounted for up to 20 percent of Jamaica’s exports by the 1880s, while Martinique became the Caribbean’s largest exporter of rum by the 1890s, both profiting from great reductions in taxes applied to rum imports in Britain and France respectively (Smith 2005: 195–6, 203–12). Distilled spirits were the single most important import in many African colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century, providing lucrative tax revenues to colonial administrations. More than half the revenues of British colonial governments in West Africa came from taxes on imported alcohol. Workers in British and German colonies in West and Southern Africa were often paid at least partly in alcoholic beverages or compelled to purchase alcohol and other goods from employers to trap them in systems of exploitative labor known as debt peonage (Korieh 2007: 103; Phillips 2014: 216–20; Nugent 2014: 136; Ambler 2017: 106; Olsson 2018: 47). Colonialist ideologies generally held that engaging Indigenous peoples in trade, including the trade in alcohol, was fundamental to the imperial objective of “civilizing” them. As the chapters by Dan Malleck, Townend, and Toner show, by the end of the nineteenth century, the trade in alcohol came into increasing tension with the other twin pillars of colonialist ideologies of “civilization”: Christianity and sobriety. Evangelical beliefs about drunkenness being an obstacle to conversion encouraged Protestant missionaries to promote the temperance cause around the world, and this also became a concern of colonial governments. Non-white peoples were generally portrayed as needing paternalistic protection, being less capable of exercising the self-control and restraint that had become cornerstones of temperance thinking, and were therefore considered more susceptible to drunkenness and alcoholism. While Indigenous peoples sometimes drove anti-alcohol measures themselves, this racial assumption fueled the targeted imposition of more extreme forms of alcohol regulation, including prohibition, on particular demographics within settler colonial and imperial systems. Different laws prohibiting the sale of distilled spirits to Native Americans and prohibiting their patronage of taverns had been applied in various parts of North America since the eighteenth century. The United States passed a more comprehensive federal law in 1892, making it illegal to “sell, give away, dispose of, exchange, or barter” any alcoholic drink, including wine and beer, to any Native American. This was superseded by the national prohibition law from 1920 to 1933, but the 1892 legislation remained in force until 1953 (Phillips 2014: 234). Similar prohibition laws targeting Indigenous peoples were applied in Canada from 1876 to 1985 and in New South Wales from 1869 until the mid-twentieth century (Pilcher 2015: 171). England, France, and Germany established specific bodies to lobby for an end to the alcohol trade in many African colonies on the premise that Africans “lacked willpower and self-discipline” and therefore needed greater protection from alcohol than Europeans. As a result, the 1889–90 Brussels Conference, a diplomatic conflagration of all the major European colonial powers engaged in the “Scramble for Africa,” prohibited the further extension of the trade and production of distilled spirits beyond where they already existed in Africa, excluding Southern Africa and French North Africa (Phillips 2014: 218). New research on colonial India and North Africa reveals the fragility of the racial discourse upon which restrictive alcohol controls were based, and demonstrates how the drinking behaviors of Europeans threatened the colonial ideology of racial superiority. In the 1860s,

10 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

the Government of India restricted licenses for drinking places in major cities and established workhouses for the confinement of out-of-work Europeans found drunk. Colonial officials were especially concerned about Europeans consuming locally produced drinks, purchasing alcohol from Indian traders or in Indian-run premises, and the visibility of Europeans’ drunk and disorderly behavior to Indian observers. They worried that the combination of the Indian climate, consumption of Indian produce, and liaisons with Indian people caused European workers to become “very similar to the ‘natives’,” losing the ability to exercise moderation and self-control and corrupting their racial identity. But they also gravely feared that the drunkenness of white Europeans, together with alcohol-induced violence, crime, and poverty, was a very “public demonstration that British rule was not inevitably linked with ‘moral progress’” (Fischer-Tiné 2014: 97, 107). Similarly, while Spanish and French physicians based in Tangiers pathologized the alcohol consumption practices of Moroccans as a means of justifying the need for colonial rule, they also came to view Tangiers itself as a corrupting, racially unhygienic environment for European colonists. Colonial authorities believed that Europeans were undergoing a process of degeneration in this environment. This was due to the intercultural and interracial sociability experienced in Tangiers’ bars, a culture of consumption that liberally mixed imported and local drinks, and Tangiers’ situation as an international trading hub rife with smuggling, crime, and prostitution. In this vein, while physicians deemed the excessive drinking of Moroccans to be evidence of their racial inferiority and lack of “civilization,” they interpreted the excessive drinking habits of European colonists as a form of psychosis engendered by the environment of Tangiers (Martínez 2016). In French Algeria, doctors and colonial officials attributed to colonized Muslims a voracious thirst for absinthe, which derived from their predisposition to excess and loss of control in all things, and led to the development of a condition known as “absinthism,” the hallmarks of which were insanity, criminality, and ultimately death. French colonists, meanwhile, were more vulnerable to succumbing to absinthism in the “uncivilized” environment of Algeria. Both groups were exhorted to drink French wine as a remedy: for the colonizers, this would help to preserve their French civility; for the colonized, wine should assist in their assimilation to French rule and culture (Salouâ Studer 2016). Debates about alcohol and its regulation therefore reveal the tensions in the racialized ideologies that legitimized imperialism. Moreover, the differential application of regulatory frameworks for accessing alcohol in colonial societies, based on ideas of racial difference, often reinforced the social marginalization of Indigenous peoples by denying them the social resources and opportunities provided by public drinking places. As the chapters by Kneale and Moss suggest, bars in multiple cross-cultural contexts offered access to friendship, socialization to new places, employment networks, unionization, and mutual aid schemes, especially for working-class men. Efforts to strip such features from beerhalls in Southern Africa, reducing them to purely functional spaces for the purchase of alcohol through disinterested management schemes, were partly driven by the desire to heighten control over the African population. The legal exclusion of Indigenous peoples from public drinking places in the United States, Canada, and Australia solidified barriers to their social integration and mobility. For instance, at the turn of the twentieth century, it had been common for men and women of the Anishinaabe nation of northern Minnesota to frequent saloons for the same purposes as, and alongside, non-Native homesteaders: namely, for sociability, community,

Introduction 11

networking, and business purposes. From 1906, the Special Office for the Suppression of Liquor among the Indians—a new body within the US Bureau of Indian Affairs—launched a crackdown against the sale of alcohol to Native people. This excluded the Anishinaabeg “from the possibility of … incorporation into the regional drinking culture of Northern Minnesota, and from the larger socioeconomic functions of the saloon,” including networks of sociability and business opportunities, that aided the social integration of other demographic groups in the region (Abbott 1999: 33–8). As Abbott argues, such policies also had the effect of exacerbating, rather than ameliorating, problem drinking amongst marginalized populations, by increasing opportunities for illicit trade and diminishing the socially positive aspects of drinking cultures (1999: 39). In twentieth-century Australia, D’Abbs has similarly argued that problem drinking was exacerbated by racially differentiated alcohol policies that excluded Aboriginal peoples from urban spaces and reinforced racial prejudice, thereby continuing their social marginalization (2012: 373–4). The unintended consequences of imperial alcohol policy in India and parts of Africa provide powerful evidence of the limits to colonial state-building and the agency of colonized peoples in resisting it. Changes made by the British to the abkari system for collecting taxes on the production and sale of alcohol and drugs in India were intended to encourage European soldiers to consume only European drinks, because locally produced drinks were deemed dangerous for them. By the 1860s and 1870s, the escalation of abkari taxes had had little effect on European consumers, but did result in a shift in Indian drinking habits, away from the traditional fermented drinks “toddy” and “Desi daru” (fermented from palm tree sap and mahua tree flowers respectively) toward distilled spirits. This shift, together with the licensing system that made drinking more visible in regulated places of sale, gave rise to a powerful critique of British imperialism in which nationalist and temperance politics converged (Gilbert 2007: 117–18; Wald 2018: 402–10). By the 1920s, this convergence was so well-established that Indian nationalists were able to argue that British rule had introduced alcohol into India altogether, immorally profiting from the associated taxation. As revenues from alcohol production and sale had become such a significant income stream for the colonial state, the campaign of civil disobedience launched by the nationalist movement in 1930 heavily targeted liquor shops, producers, and drinkers (Colvard 2014: 174–7). Indians involved in the liquor trade and drinkers themselves at times resisted both British alcohol policies and nationalist anti-alcohol activism. An 1878 abkari law in Bombay that made it very difficult for small-scale producers to survive in the alcohol trade provoked widespread protests, including strikes, non-payment of taxes, and non-­compliance with licensing requirements (Saldanha 1995: 2324; Wald 2018: 411). Illegal alcohol production grew substantially in defiance of nationalist moral suasion in the early 1930s and partial prohibition laws introduced from 1937 in provinces controlled by the Indian National Congress, and some traders relocated beyond prohibition boundary lines to defend their livelihoods (Colvard 2014: 177–80, 193–4). The dynamics between local resistance to colonial alcohol policy and emergent nationalist politics worked out differently in British West Africa. As in India, British and African temperance activists criticized the British empire for profiting from the spread of alcohol to its African colonies. However, debates about this issue in the early twentieth century show how the racialization of alcohol policies was intensely contested. Participants in a 1909 inquiry into the effects of alcohol in Southern Nigeria disputed the legitimacy of discriminatory legislation

12 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

for African consumers and rejected the “race argument” that prohibitionist p ­ olicies applied in other parts of Africa were appropriate for Southern Nigeria (Ambler 2017: 116–18). The British authorities decided to increase tariffs on imported alcohol in Southern Nigeria in the 1920s in an effort to reduce consumption by making alcohol more expensive, and implemented a phased prohibition on imported spirits in the Gold Coast in the 1930s. Instead, local production of distilled spirits rapidly expanded; this was already an illicit trade in the Gold Coast and colonial legislation criminalized it in Southern Nigeria in 1931. The widespread view that these prohibitions reflected the colonial state’s desire to protect its own revenues, at the expense of ordinary producers’ livelihoods and of the social freedoms of consumers, led to “a situation in which alcohol could become a site for the defiance of the colonial regime” (Korieh 2007: 101). Even those whose social or political status meant they would normally disapprove of alcohol, and especially illegal alcohol trading, would not cooperate with colonial officials in identifying and prosecuting the trade. By the 1950s, nationalist politicians embedded calls for the legalization of locally produced spirits into their cause, including Kwame Nkrumah who founded the Convention People’s Party in 1949 and in 1957 became the first leader of an independent Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast (Nugent 2014: 141–2; Akyeampong 2017: 162–5, 172). Discriminatory attitudes and policies regarding alcohol were not exclusive to colonial and imperial contexts but were also manifest in Latin American nations where the legacy of colonialism helped to embed similar racial ideologies about Indigenous peoples. In early twentieth-century Guatemala, political leaders viewed alcoholism as one of several endemic problems affecting the Indigenous population and that was holding back national development and modernization.2 Evidence from national police records detailing arrests for public drunkenness in the 1930s and 1940s suggests that the non-Indigenous population drank to excess more often, and in more socially disruptive ways, than Guatemala’s Indigenous population (Carey Jr 2014: 137). Despite this, racial assumptions about the inherent susceptibility of Indigenous people toward problem drinking meant that “the conflation of Indianness and drunkenness was so complete that the two words became virtually synonymous with one another in official discourse” (GarrardBurnett 2012: 161. See also Garrard-Burnett 2000: 341–56). Such attitudes produced a similar tension as that faced by European imperial powers in Africa; namely, between the desire to promote temperate values among Indigenous peoples, making them into more productive, ­virtuous, and “civilized” subjects; the belief that Indigenous peoples could only be induced to work in industries by offering them payment in alcohol; and the state’s heavy reliance on alcohol for tax and other revenues. In 1899, for instance, alcohol taxes provided the Guatemalan state with its largest revenue stream. But when restrictions on the supply and sale of alcohol were imposed, these were targeted on Indigenous consumers: a 1940 law prohibited alcohol sales on large plantations, where Indigenous people were the primary laborers (Carey Jr 2012: 122; Carey Jr 2014: 133, 138). Alcohol history in Guatemala, as in the British imperial context, has important lessons for how ordinary people engaged with and challenged state power. In particular, the key role of women, often non-white, in the aguardiente (sugarcane liquor) trade, both legal and illegal, has revealed their hitherto underappreciated contribution to Guatemala’s economic development, their ability to exercise political agency in criticizing the damaging effects of particular regulatory systems on their livelihoods, and their resistance to the increasing

Introduction 13

criminalization of informal, unlicensed trading (Carey Jr. 2012; Opie 2012; Reeves 2012; Schwartzkopf 2012). The same is true for Mexico (Toxqui 2014; Pierce 2014).

War Anti-alcohol movements that responded to the concerns raised by industrialization and racially discriminatory policies that restricted Indigenous peoples’ access to alcohol were both connected to the development and application of new forms of state power that concentrated on monitoring, controlling, improving, and policing citizens and subjects. This power was frequently challenged and contested, but the alignment of government, business, and medical interests in the management of public health, economic efficiency, and social order took on heightened urgency in the context of the First World War, which has been credited with “triggering a global wave of prohibition” (Pilcher 2015: 173). It is important to recognize, however, that the extension of prohibition during the First World War was facilitated by a longer-term development of ideas about the state, as an organism whose health must be preserved, and the nation, as a body of people with some unifying essence under threat by corruption of various kinds. Concerns about both converged in the early twentieth century, and not just because of the First World War. Moreover, despite the widely publicized failures of national prohibition in the United States, the management of alcohol in everyday life remained a major concern of states around the world. At the same time, while wars often presented temporary problems for the alcohol industries, they also helped to drive technological, business, and commercial innovations that facilitated longer-term expansions of production and trade. In turn, these contributed to social transformations that changed attitudes and practices around alcohol particularly in terms of gender and health. As is explained in the chapters by Malleck, Tracy, Townend, and Toner, accumulating concerns about the impact of alcohol on social order, economic productivity, the vitality, health, and morality of the population at large, and the overall strength of the state took on heightened importance in the context of war. Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 gave impetus to the anti-alcohol movement in France, fueling medical and psychiatric concerns that the rising consumption of industrial alcohols like absinthe had weakened the population, especially young men, and was leading to national degeneration. Criticism of Russia’s State Vodka Monopoly increased sharply in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, based on the belief that heavy drinking habits had fatally crippled the Russian military. In Britain, defeat in the Boer War sparked debates about alcohol and national degeneration too (Phillips 2014: 202). By the late nineteenth century, degeneration theory became a major part of medical and psychiatric debates, as well as cultural representations, of alcoholism and alcohol-­related disorders in France, Spain, Germany, Britain, the United States, and Latin America. Articulated most systematically by the French psychiatrist Benedict Morel (1809–73), degeneration theory described the hereditary passing on of deviant behaviors, mental illnesses, and physical maladies from generation to generation. Within this theory, excessive patterns of alcohol consumption were both a cause and consequence of degeneration. Parents with alcohol problems were more likely to produce unhealthy, unstable, or perhaps even criminal children, and those children were also more likely to become alcoholics themselves, thus continuing the cycle of degeneration. Although degeneration theory was increasingly disregarded in

14 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

scientific circles by the 1910s, except notably in the field of eugenics, its core language and ideas about alcohol had penetrated public discourse and remained influential particularly in times of national crisis (Bynum 1984; Snelders et al. 2008; Edman 2015: 600–1; Kamenov 2017: 134–9). Because degeneration was conceptualized as a cumulative, progressive process, alcohol abuse was regularly framed as a “public health and social order problem of enormous proportions that threatened the very fabric of the nation,” drawing on metaphors of contagion, military conflict, and extinction (Toner 2015b: 161). One of Mexico’s leading national daily newspapers in 1899, for instance, described alcoholics and their degenerate offspring as “a shambolic army, a tragic phalanx, an advancing troop that is painfully unfit to engage in the battle for life” (“Las víctimas del alcohol” 1899). In declaring his support for a constitutional ban on alcohol in America in 1913, war hero and congressman Richmond P. Hobson declared “the principles of war are the same whether it is a war between nations or a war between civilization and its destroying foe, the liquor traffic” (McGirr 2016: 4). Following this longer-term framing of the alcohol question in the language of degeneration, national strength, and a war for survival, the 1910s saw the introduction of prohibitionist policies in Russia (1914–25), Iceland (1915–35), Norway (1916–27), Finland (1919–32), Hungary (1919), and the United States (1920–33). Short-lived and more partial prohibition laws were also enacted in various parts of Canada, France, Mexico, and Denmark in the late 1910s, while in Britain the government established state control over the alcohol industry in regions of strategic importance and much stricter licensing regulations across the country (Edman 2015: 592–600; Pilcher 2015: 173). Many of these measures were explicitly framed as necessary for victory in the war: emphasizing the need to preserve grain and other supplies as opposed to wasting them on alcohol production, reducing inefficiencies in the civilian workforce and improving military discipline on the front, and diverting alcohol production toward strategic industrial purposes (Phillips 2014: 240–1). Even in countries not directly involved in the war, such as Norway and Iceland, governments viewed prohibition as a means of mitigating against food shortages and potential unrest that the war brought to Europe as a whole (Johansen 2013: 46–7). But it is also clear that the longer-term prohibition campaigns that had been gathering apace during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant that approaches to alcohol regulation were already traveling in a more stringent direction and the laws went beyond, and indeed outlasted, what was necessary for wartime austerity. The war itself did not produce a sea-change in the way that alcohol was understood and regulated. By the early twentieth century, many politicians, medical professionals, business leaders, and social reformers were already in favor of expanding “the police power of national governments” to mold a healthy, orderly, and productive citizenry “that guaranteed the state’s security and prosperity” (Courtwright 2017: 315). The context of war, and the long-term use of military metaphors in the fight against alcohol which chimed powerfully with patriotic wartime rhetoric, often made the case for prohibition more persuasive to be sure, but prohibitionism was rooted in the longer-term development of state power and its convergence with nationalist concerns. Changes in state regulatory frameworks, the alcohol industry, cultures of consumption, and medical understandings of problem drinking between the 1920s and 1940s meant that there was not such a major turn toward prohibition during the Second World War. In France, there were some echoes of previous fears about alcohol weakening its military power and causing national degeneration, and the Vichy government introduced a range of restrictions

Introduction 15

on alcohol production and sale during the war. Nazi Germany also undertook major efforts to restrict alcohol production, preserve grain supplies for food, and limit consumption in the armed forces. The United States, Canada, and Britain rationed alcohol and increased taxes to generate more revenue for wartime governments. But in most places, nothing like the crackdown that occurred during the First World War transpired (Phillips 2014: 296–9). This is partly attributed to the discrediting of prohibition as an approach to alcohol regulation, both in policy-making circles and in popular culture, that had occurred during the demise of national alcohol prohibition in the United States. The widely publicized and often sensationalized failures of American prohibition, particularly its relationship to the expansion of violent, organized crime, were noted vociferously by an organized repeal movement, politicians, and journalists, mocked by many leading literary figures, and immortalized in an emergent gangster movie genre, in such films as The Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar (1931), and Scarface (1932) (Munby 1999: 39–65; Shadoian 2003: 40–68; Drowne 2005: 3–4; Clark 2009: 127–8). However, the regulatory landscape following the repeal of national prohibition laws and other wartime measures reminds us that states did not suddenly relinquish the ability or the desire to manage their citizens’ access to alcohol. In the United States, most elements of alcohol regulation were devolved from federal to state or county jurisdiction in the mid-1930s. Two states continued with total prohibition, and a further five continued to prohibit all alcoholic beverages except beer. Twelve states legalized only the home consumption of alcoholic drinks and fifteen adopted state-run monopolies for the sale of alcohol. Across those states that legalized public drinking in hotels, bars, and other venues, many had strict laws against Sunday openings; differentiated rules for selling beer, wine, and distilled spirits; and regulations against the involvement of breweries in the management of drinking places (Aaron and Musto 1981: 173). In addition, changes to the criminal justice system brought in to enforce prohibition—new powers of surveillance, federal crime agencies, expanded border patrols, an expanded federal prison system, and national statistical surveys—had lasting legacies. The federal government remained responsible for investigating illegal production of alcohol and the federal apparatus constructed to do so became central to America’s “domestic and global war on drugs” that continues today (McGirr 2016: 211). Norway’s prohibition law was repealed for many of the same reasons as the American: to tackle economic difficulties, illicit trade, and organized crime. Prohibition was replaced, however, by a very restrictive regulatory framework. The state managed a monopoly on the importation and sale of wine and spirits with only thirteen state-run stores across the country, imposed high taxes on alcohol, applied age limits for sales and strict rules around the serving of alcohol in restaurants and hotels, and allowed municipal governments to ban alcohol sales in their own localities (Johansen 2013: 60–1). In Britain, licensing laws governing opening hours remained stricter than they had been before the First World War until the 1960s, and in some districts much longer, while the system of state management of the drinks trade in the Carlisle region remained in place until the 1970s (Yeomans 2014: 115). In many ways, these regulatory systems made prohibition unnecessary during the Second World War, as did the changing nature, operation, and strategies of the alcohol industry. As the chapters by McMichael and Hames explain, these changes had themselves been shaped by the impact of the First World War and the strict regulations it brought. In much of Europe, the physical destruction of agriculture in sites of occupation and conflict

16 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

hit the wine industries very hard, shortages of grain and manpower led to reduced beer production, and distilleries were diverted to the production of industrial alcohol in aid of the war effort. In response to the decline of alcohol production and consumption during the war years, the interwar period saw major industry consolidation and, in the case of distilling, diversification. By 1936, five companies—all members of the conglomerate Distillers Company, Ltd—owned 70 percent of the UK’s malt whiskey distilleries, compared to sixty years previously when they had all been individually owned. Although consolidation began in the late nineteenth century, this process greatly accelerated in response to the challenges the industry faced during and following the First World War. At the same time, Distillers Company, Ltd managed to grow steadily throughout the war and interwar years by diversifying production toward not only beverage alcohol but also fuel, pharmaceuticals, and various industrial products. With the alcohol industry dominated by larger, fewer companies by the onset of the Second World War, they were more able to coordinate efforts to mitigate against any hostile policy change. In Britain and the United States, distilleries cooperated to divert production into industrial alcohol for military supplies. Although beer production contracted during the war, and damage to facilities in European breweries necessitated major consolidation post-1945, many breweries mobilized successful marketing strategies during the war itself. Advertisements portrayed beer as moderate, healthful, and essential to both military and civilian morale. Some companies actively publicized their contribution to the war effort, creating a patriotic brand image. Guinness, for instance, donated free beer to military hospitals, shipped beer to soldiers on the front line, and arranged discounts for soldiers on the home front. American brewers were required to donate 15 percent of their produce to the armed forces; while this was a temporary financial loss, in the long run it created strong brand loyalty, rooted in patriotism, that helped the industry. Wartime diversification away from beverage alcohol by the major US and UK distilleries, meanwhile, stimulated spirits production elsewhere. The sharp decline in imports of alcohol from Britain and then the United States to British West Africa in the early 1940s added further fuel to the expansion of illegal gin production and contributed to the trade’s growing role as a symbol of anti-imperial sentiment (Akyeampong 2017: 165, 171–2). Mexico’s tequila industry benefitted from a huge upswing in exports during the war, growing from 21,621 liters in 1940 to 4.5 million liters in 1944. While this international demand for tequila was short-lived and fell even more precipitously after the war than it had risen, the new economies of scale developed to meet the demands of the export market supported a longer-term expansion of production for the domestic market (Gaytán 2014: 65). Wartime conditions and changing regulatory frameworks had broader social ramifications, as the chapters by Kneale and Moss show. In Britain during the First World War, women’s growing participation in wage labor, particularly in the munitions industry, and the high wartime wages earned through this work, meant that women’s drinking in public places became both more affordable and more socially acceptable. While this was not uncontested, the trend continued through the interwar years, as women who had experienced greater social liberties because of participation in the wartime economy continued to patronize pubs more frequently. The pub improvement project, influenced by the Central Control Board’s wartime disinterested management scheme, likewise made pubs into more socially respectable venues for women and families. The “improved” pubs sought to attract female

Introduction 17

customers by decentering the “bar” as a masculine space and expanding the purpose of pub-going beyond alcohol consumption itself, providing seating, food, and entertainment. As Tracy’s chapter suggests, the First World War also contributed to a widespread de-investment in specialist alcohol treatment facilities and programs, such as inebriate asylums and social workers. Institutions that treated problem drinking were affected in all countries participating in the war. Nevertheless, government officials, researchers, and temperance advocates from a wide range of countries continued to debate how to deal with the alcohol problem at international conferences during the interwar years in similar terms that had driven the wartime restrictions: national efficiency, health, and strength. In some places, the emphasis on alcohol’s negative impact on racial hygiene increased in this pursuit of national vitality: sterilization programs were implemented to “treat” the spread of alcoholism, and the range of social ills with which it had been associated since the emergence of degeneration theory, in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and parts of the United States and Canada. Such measures were typically concentrated on the lower classes (Valverde 2003a: 189–90; Phillips 2014: 292; Edman 2015: 597–609; Sevelsted 2019: 88, 93). At the same time, the growing acceptance of the disease model of alcoholism by the early 1940s helps to account for the muted response to the drink question during the Second World War (Yeomans 2014: 130–1). In the United States, for instance, organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, the Yale Center for Alcohol Studies, and the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism, all founded between 1935 and 1945, helped to spread public awareness of alcoholism as a sickness rather than a moral contagion, through “mass-circulation magazines, radio interviews, and educational campaigns targeting social workers, clergymen, doctors, and even film producers” (Rotskoff 2002: 66. See also McIntosh 2003: 32–3). The Alcoholics Anonymous model for treating alcoholism spread around the world quite quickly, with branches opening in Mexico in 1940, Ireland in 1946, Scotland in 1948, France in 1960, and, in adapted form, in Japan in 1963 (Sournia 1990: 172; Blocker Jr et al. 2003: xlii–xliv; Butler and Jordan 2007: 880). As the chapter by Toner suggests, literary and cinematic explorations of alcoholism as a psychological illness, which became more common by the middle of the twentieth century, also spread public awareness. Some iconic works, including Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1922) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), explored alcoholism in symbolic connection to the horrors of twentieth-century wars—the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War, respectively—and masculine responses to these crises of modernity. Nevertheless, all these changes did not represent a simple transition in understandings of problem drinking from a predominantly moral issue to a medical one. The elaboration of models of addiction and the increasing use of alcoholism itself as a physiological and/or psychological diagnosis in social, cultural, and medical spheres certainly speak to a much greater pathologization of alcohol use and abuse than had prevailed in the early nineteenth century. Yet, although members of Alcoholics Anonymous played a significant role in popularizing the “disease model” of alcoholism, the organization itself did not endorse this view. Key elements of its method for dealing with alcoholism had much in common with the moral ethos and suasion of the earlier temperance movements: the role of spirituality in seeking and maintaining sobriety, combining a personal commitment to total abstinence from drinking with the responsibility to spread the message of sobriety, and sharing experiences of

18 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

the devastation wrought by alcohol as well as stories of recovery (Kurtz 2002). In this and other ways, the medicalization of alcohol consumption as a health problem was not linear or uncontested. Well into the twentieth century, beers and wines were still seen as healthy and were specifically and effectively marketed as such. Medical professionals continued to use alcohol extensively in treatments for certain ailments, such as tuberculosis and diabetes, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and to a lesser extent in the early twentieth century. It is also clear that class, gender, moral norms, and even racial prejudice shaped the evolution of medical concepts that sought to explain, categorize, and treat alcohol problems. This is especially evident from the embedding of degeneration theory and eugenicist thinking into definitions of, and treatment for, alcoholism.

Conclusions Between 1850 and 1950, the interrelated social, political, economic, and cultural issues raised by industrialization, empire, and war led to the intensive re-evaluation of alcohol’s place in society in many countries around the world. On the one hand, the greater availability and affordability of different types of alcohol diversified cultures of consumption, making alcohol and the places in which it was consumed a key part of leisure pursuits across the social spectrum. The alcohol industry also became big business, helping to stimulate the integration of national and international markets, and providing substantial revenues for both colonial and national states. New branding practices intersected with nationalist ideologies to make some alcoholic drinks emblematic of various nations’ heritage, tradition, and identity. Yet this was also a key century in the reframing of alcohol as a, or even the, source of other problems, and treating alcohol as a problem in and of itself. Powerful anti-alcohol movements emerged and gathered strength, and intersected with the increased use of state power to mold a healthy, productive, and obedient citizenry, contributing to the overhaul of regulatory frameworks, ranging from higher taxation, stricter licensing systems, and government monopolies to partial or complete prohibitions. There was also an increase in medical and psychiatric research, institutes, and conferences devoted to the treatment, identification, and stigmatization of certain categories of problem drinkers, often along class or racial lines. Cultural representations of alcohol use increasingly, though not exclusively, depicted problem drinkers through the pathologizing lens of alcoholism. There was, however, no straightforward transition from tradition to modernity in ideas and practices surrounding alcohol. The drinks industries certainly modernized in many parts of the world; industrialization contributed to changing patterns and places of alcohol consumption; many states acquired the capacity to regulate, police, and treat drinking behaviors on a much larger scale; and the powerful anti-alcohol movements that thrived in this period were in large part driven by concerns about how the conditions of modernity brought disruption to the social fabric. But what we might call ritual and community drinking patterns—at secular and religious festivals, rites of passage like funerals and weddings, family celebrations, election parties—continued to mark drinking behaviors in industrializing societies like Britain, where urban, leisure-based drinking was on the rise, as well as in less industrialized societies in Russia and East Africa. Religious views about the immorality of drinking first became more influential, before they were joined by secular ideologies and medical interpretations about the problems of drinking. Some initiatives, like the pub improvement project in Britain,

Introduction 19

aimed to show that modernizing drinking practices could be more socially beneficial than preserving “traditional” drinking habits. Others, like the attacks on absinthe in continental Europe, emphasized the dangers of “modern” drinks. Latin American physicians and politicians widely understood alcoholism as a disease of the poor that had been at least partly produced by industrial modernity. Nationalists in India invented a tradition of non-drinking to strengthen their critique of British imperialism. Finally, alcohol was fundamentally embedded in both top-down and bottom-up state-building processes. This becomes clear by combining analysis of how alcohol has been politicized, debated, and regulated through official institutions and policies, with investigation of the real people, who worked in the alcohol industries, consumed alcohol, socialized in drinking places, campaigned for change, and worked within and against these structures more broadly. Moreover, the global framework of this introduction demonstrates that the relationship between alcohol and state-building goes beyond the widely acknowledged tension between the state’s desire to restrict the alcohol trade to foster social order, worker productivity, and public health, and the desire to retain valuable state revenues gathered from multiple levels in the alcohol commodity chain. Anti-alcohol movements brought together, in cooperation and conflict, extremely diverse sets of actors in trying to manage urbanization, modernization, political upheaval, and class, ethnic, and religious divisions, in multiple national and colonial settings. Governments, business interests, the medical profession, religious institutions, and civil society aligned in different combinations around the world to manage access to alcohol, and through that, the private lives, bodies, and social behavior of individuals. Ordinary men and women engaged in alcohol production, sale, and consumption variously challenged the legitimacy of laws or moral norms that threatened their livelihoods and lifestyles, while others participated in their construction. This volume therefore argues that the age of industry, empire, and war transformed the place of alcohol in many societies; more importantly, in all these ways, alcohol also made the modern world.

20 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

1 PRODUCTION ANDREW MCMICHAEL

Introduction The production of alcohol underwent a fundamental, if not revolutionary, series of changes in the period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Technological and scientific advances in a variety of fields spurred greater efficiency in alcohol production, storage, and distribution. In Europe, Louis Pasteur’s experiments with yeast and what would come to be known as Pasteurization ushered in an era of experimentation, precision, and a more scientific focus on production. Prior to 1900, production in the Caribbean underwent a shift as labor patterns changed and less sugar was available for rum. Meanwhile, industry consolidation, factory-level brewing, and railroads changed the face of the industry in the United States. In Europe, likewise, railroads greatly influenced wine production, but the introduction of a new, devastating disease fundamentally altered wine production and culture across the continent. As the twentieth century dawned, various African countries under colonial European rule faced many of the same changes seen in the United States and Europe a century earlier. Finally, two global wars profoundly affected alcohol production, stimulating demand in some cases but devastating productive capacities in others.

Technological Changes The period from 1850 to 1950 witnessed far-reaching technological changes in the alcohol industry. Some were largely packaging and distribution methods that affected the pace and methods of production. These changes included the introduction of mechanized bottle-blowing, mechanical bottle-washers, the development of the cork-lined metal crown (and the attendant capping machines), and advances in metal-fabricating technology that made possible stable aluminum cans and metal kegs (Baron 1962; Stack 2000: 435–63; Beatty 2009: 317–48). Several major technologies had immediate, far-reaching, direct influences on production. First, the invention and then widespread use of steam power in milling fundamentally altered the ability of brewers and distillers to churn out ever-larger quantities of their products. Maltsters in major European cities introduced steam power in the eighteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth century this trend had begun to spread to smaller cities around England, Europe, and the United States. As early as 1865, post-war New Orleans boasted a brewery in which steam powered a grist mill, heated kettles, pumped mash and wort, and moved the liquid to cooling vessels (Baron 1962: 229). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the use of steam-powered mills in small towns around Europe and the Americas

had greatly increased the output of breweries and distilleries, fostering industry consolidation (Hornsey 2003: 439–40). The combined effects of technology and science were seen in England and Wales, between 1850 and 1880, where an increase of just under 9 percent in the number of breweries, from 2,305 to 2,507, nonetheless translated into a leap of more than 105 percent in output, from an average of 4,062 barrels each to an average of 8,362 barrels (Hornsey 2003: 476). Distillers, most utilizing steam power and the new column stills, also increased Scottish whiskey output by almost 125 percent in the latter half of the nineteenth century, from just over 19 million proof-gallons to more than 43 million proof-gallons. Of greater importance to alcohol production was the introduction of mechanical refrigeration by means of compression. For centuries, alcohol production followed the cooler seasons, and in some climates stopped altogether in the hot summers. When and where possible the preservation of locally harvested ice might extend production into the warmer months or even year-round (Baron 1962: 231–4). The amount of ice necessary to allow brewing in warmer months in the United States could be staggering. Pabst and Schandein, in the relatively mild climate of Milwaukee, used around 15,000 tons of ice each year, while Baron estimates that the Phillip Best Brewing Company used around 60,000 tons in 1880 (Baron 1962: 234; Ogle 2006: 58). When the Pabst and Schandein families expanded their Midwest brewing operations into Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871, their warehouse held 600 tons of ice dedicated to the storage of beer (Ogle 2006: 59). Indeed, while ready access to clear water is critical to the success of a brewery, “any town which had its own ice was considered to have an immediate advantage” (Baron 1962: 234). Artificial refrigeration freed alcohol production from nature’s rhythms and revolutionized the production of alcohol. While some forms of artificial refrigeration had been available since the mid-eighteenth century, refrigerators that utilized the more efficient compression technology first saw practical development and manufacture in Australia in the mid-1800s (Hornsey 2003: 465. See also Hård 1994). Refrigeration gave brewers, distillers, and vintners a better ability to store ingredients, and especially yeast, for longer periods and to ship their products over ever-greater distances. More importantly, ever-larger brewing vessels could be joined to ever-smaller refrigeration units, allowing for quicker chilling of boiled wort, thus reducing the chances for infection. As refrigeration technology improved, American brewers—many of whom specialized in German-style light lagers dependent on cool fermentation temperatures—became the leading purchasers of the technology (Rees 2005: 551. See also Appel 1990: 21–38). One of the earliest breweries to use artificial refrigeration seems to have been the S. Liebmann’s Sons Brewing Company in Brooklyn, New York, in 1870. By 1876, argues Baron, the introduction and early adoption of artificial refrigeration by brewers meant that “the modern brewery was virtually a reality” (1962: 235–6). At the same time, new techniques in spirits production began to emerge. Prior to 1850, the vast majority of spirits around the world were produced using pot stills, in a process sometimes called batch-distilling. In this process the fermented mash, called wash in whiskey-making, or wine in brandy-making, is placed into a large pot, to which heat is applied. During the heating process, the liquid evaporates and rises into an arm. There it condenses—either on its own or with the help of a cooling chamber—and then runs out of the arm into a container. At the end of this process, the distiller refills the pot and begins a new batch. The development of the column still (also known as a patent still), and in particular the modifications developed by Aeneas Coffey, allowed distillers to produce larger

22 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

batches of whiskey in continuous cycles, leading to ever-increasing quantities of product as the size of column stills grew (Stewart et al. 2003: 2). The Coffey still also had the advantage of being heated by steam, which applied a more even heat to the liquid, allowing for greater control over the final product. The column still, with its greater technological sophistication, required correspondingly greater capital outlay. Nonetheless producers of brandy and rum in England, Europe, and then the Americas adopted the technology beginning in the mid-nineteenth century (Weir 1984: 50). The greater costs of a patent still meant that smaller producers in the UK, including home distillers, continued to utilize the older, smaller pot stills. Large-scale patent-still distillers quickly outpaced the supply of local grain production, forcing them to rely on ever-increasing imports of grain from around the world. In particular the proportion of foreign grain used in the production of Scottish whiskey grew steadily in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A series of protectionist measures on the part of the British government led to a steady decline in production between 1920 and 1930, and when pot-still distillers engaged in a self-imposed reduction, the production of whiskey fell almost 97 percent in three years (Weir 1984: 56, 59). In the Caribbean, the opposite trend dominated, with distillers in most of the islands preferring to stick with a tried-and-true technology. This could have been due to the conservative nature of Caribbean distillers finding themselves in the midst of a decline in production and not willing to gamble on a new technology. Alternatively, perhaps the expense of importing new, expensive stills did not offset the savings in fuel costs, or Caribbean distillers might have believed that the pot-still produced a better-tasting liquor. Whatever the case, the pot-still remained the still of choice for rum producers until the mid-twentieth century, with some continuing to use them at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Smith 2005: 198–9). No discussion of technology in the production of alcohol can neglect to at least mention the role of railroads in production and distribution. While there exist only a few direct studies of the impact of the spread of railroads on alcohol production, studies of railroads and economic systems acknowledge the impact of this technology. In some areas, the effect was to revitalize regional local alcohol production, as with the wine industry in Cuyo, Argentina, in the mid-nineteenth century. As transportation costs decreased, local wineries expanded their distribution to become more regionally and nationally competitive with their increasingly expensive European counterparts, although questions about the quality of the wines certainly highlighted the extent to which a single technology could spur an increase in production (Goodwin, Jr. 1977: 616, 622, 631). In the United States, a brewery or distillery could only transform itself from a small, regional to a national producer with the help of railroads (Baron 1962: 257).

Scientific Advances The effect of scientific advances on the industrialization of alcohol production cannot be overstated. By the late seventeenth century, Antonj van Leeuwenhoek had discovered the existence of microorganisms. Building on that work, in 1762 Michael Combrune first published The Theory and Practice of Brewing, which described the process of fermentation as the “motion of particles … gradually removed from their former situation, and after some visible separation, joined together in a different order and arrangement so as to constitute

Production 23

a new compound” ([1762] 1804: 6). While all brewers and distillers understood the necessity of yeast as part of the process, arguments over the exact nature of yeast and its role in the process of fermentation continued to puzzle scientists in the century before 1850. Combrune himself distinguished between “natural fermentation,” which “rises spontaneously,” and “artificial fermentation,” which requires adjuncts to initiate the process (1804: 80). Most vexing for scientists was the question of whether yeast was a living organism or a chemical compound of some kind. By the mid-nineteenth century, scientists understood yeast to be a living organism. Louis Pasteur, building on the work of other scientists, while at the same time forging a new path into brewing science, discovered that fermentation was a chemical process dependent on a microscopic form of life (Hornsey 2003: 415). As E. M. Sigsworth notes, Pasteur initially hoped to liberate brewing from seasonal temperature restrictions and help prolong storage (1965: 536). The changes he brought to alcohol production—as well as to the food industry and science in general—were so far-reaching that even by the end of the nineteenth century scientists sometimes referred to the period before the publication of Études sur la Biére as “the dark ages of the brewing industry” (Sigsworth 1965: 537). Sigsworth, speaking to the immediate effect on the process of making alcohol, argues that “no comparable revolution in practice occurred” at any other time in history (1965: 541). Some argument could be made that Pasteur’s discoveries had relatively little immediate effect on alcohol producers. Pasteur’s work in understanding microorganisms certainly led to a greater understanding of the need for sanitization, but in fact this advice had been around for centuries. It had also shown that lower fermentation temperatures helped control microorganisms. But lower temperatures also changed the ultimate flavors of the product, something which consumers were not likely to accept, and that was not easily achieved until the widespread use of refrigeration. Still, the potential for a revolutionary application of Pasteur’s work was not lost on brewers, who helped fund Pasteur’s research, and who, along with vintners, distillers, and cheesemakers, were among the earliest to put his work to practical application (Geison 1995: 41). While the “scientification” of alcohol production spread from Europe to England to North America and around the world, the main effect of Pasteur’s discoveries on alcohol production came in the form of a deeper understanding of process and practices, as well as the professionalization of brewing and distilling. Brewers and distillers opened institutes and schools that focused on training professionals in the science and process of alcohol production. These included the Siebel Institute in 1872 in Chicago, the Research and Teaching Institute for Brewing in 1883 in Berlin, the forerunner of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling in 1886 in London, and the incorporation of the Weihenstephan Brewery as the Royal Bavarian Academy for Agriculture and Beer Brewing in 1893. Even with the disclaimer, Sigsworth identifies four main effects that scientific advances had on the production of alcohol. The first came from a better understanding of the malting process and the conversion of malt to sugar, which gave more precise control over efficiency and alcohol percentage. Second, the work of the Guinness Company on the nitrogen content of barley allowed brewers and distillers to more accurately select types of barley. Third, scientists better understood the relationship between pH values in water and the quality of the product. Finally, though not directly related to production, fertilization and pest control increased yields, lowering prices of raw materials (Sigsworth 1965: 549–50).

24 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Figure 1.1  Brewing, Louis Pasteur (1822–95). French chemist and pioneer microbiologist used this apparatus for cooling and fermenting during his work on beer. From Louis Figuier’s “Les Merveilles de la Industrie,” published in Paris c. 1870. Image by Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images.

Of perhaps more importance was the ability to better understand the underlying causes of spoiled fermentation, which, if the case of the Whitbread brewery in London is typical, could account for around 20 percent of production (Sigsworth 1965: 538). Overall, Sigsworth did not see a great deal of change in England or Europe.

Production 25

According to Martin Stack, however, American alcohol producers were quicker to adopt Pasteur’s methods, with late nineteenth-century American brewers leading the way (Stack 2000: 440). This quick adaptation in some ways reflected a broader trend in nineteenth-­ century industrialization—the United States, slower to begin industrialization than the UK, was better positioned to adapt and install new technologies. Alcohol production was no different in this regard. By the end of the nineteenth century, alcohol production in Europe and the Americas had entered the age of science and technology on the back of industrializing economies. Steam engines and refrigeration resulted in more efficient and cleaner processing, while railroads increased the scale of the distribution system. Brewers, distillers, and vintners began to employ scientists and establish facilities to help them better understand their products and production process, while laboratories such as those at Carlsberg developed into centers for the understanding of yeast and its role in fermentation, as well as for the development of new strains of yeast. While alcohol production at the end of the nineteenth century remained an art, Baron’s assertion was also true, in some sense, that the brewer and distiller, who “at one time had been little more than a superior cook, had been transformed into a mechanic and an engineer” as well as a “chemist and a biologist” (1962: 237).

Industry Trends in the Americas, Europe, and the UK While no general survey of the alcohol industry in the Americas as a whole exists, studies of brewing, viticulture, and spirits production speak to the role of both voluntary and involuntary migration to the Americas. In the French and British Caribbean in the mid-eighteenth century, rum production continued to dominate the economic landscape. While various Western countries emancipated their slaves at different points in the nineteenth century, most quickly implemented restrictive vagrancy laws that in the Caribbean forced freed­people back into the sugar mills and rum distilleries (Smith 2005: 168). French rum production, spurred by Napoleon I’s decision to allow imports to France from the French Caribbean as well as a more friendly American market, skyrocketed. French Martinique saw exports rise from just more than a quarter million gallons in 1850 to almost 4 million gallons by century’s end (Smith 2005: 212). In the Spanish Caribbean, where rum manufacture was illegal, fermented cane sugar in the form of aguardiente continued the popularity it had enjoyed for several centuries. Cuban rum production fluctuated in the last half of the nineteenth century, with exports ending up where they began, at around five hundred thousand gallons (Smith 2005: 216). Frederick Smith argues that the lack of rum production was due in large part to “the slow transition to free labor,” as well as the technological sophistication of the Cuban sugar industry (2005: 217–18). On the one hand, advanced sugar-extraction technology left smaller amounts of the by-products that might profitably be distilled into alcohol. On the other hand, emancipation came slowly to Cuba, spanning the several decades in the last half of the century at which point Chinese immigrants supplemented the free labor population. Most of this labor went into the ever-expanding sugar industry (Scott 2000). The transition to free labor in sugar cane and rum production served as a daunting challenge for former slaves as well as rum distillers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a problem made worse for British distillers by decline of British sugar production that began

26 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

mid-century. Soil exhaustion and increased labor costs made Caribbean rum more expensive to produce, while increased competition with beet sugar importers led to lower overall sugar prices. Protected markets in Continental Europe decreased profitability for distillers in the Caribbean and in England, while increased competition resulting from the spread of rum production to other sugar-producing areas of the world further lowered prices (Smith 2005: 194–5). An increased effort to promote temperance among African laborers on the part of European and American missionaries also reduced the amount of alcohol consumed in the islands. As a result of these and other factors, British rum production declined around the Caribbean and in England. While the decline was not uniform, the overall trend was clear. Jamaica serves as an instructive example, where exports of rum declined from around 4.5 million gallons in 1800 to a bit more than 1.5 million gallons in 1900 (Smith 2005: 204). While the number of distilleries in the United States decreased after 1850, production increased as small producers slowly gave way to more efficient larger operations (Rorabaugh 1981: 87). Those spirits found a ready market among working-class communities, including immigrants—who by 1910 comprised 14 percent of the US population and who brought their own drinking traditions to the United States (Pegram 1998: 88; US Census Bureau 1999. See also Martin 2010). Under the twin pressures of progressive reform and immigrant drinking patterns, American alcohol production underwent a slow change between 1850 and 1915. Production of wine, spirits, and beer all increased in the years before the end of the First World War, mirroring the increasing population as well as greater industrialization. As Richard Mendelson notes in his legal history of wine in America, small-scale wine production occurred in ten different states, with New York, Ohio, and California (with its SpanishCatholic heritage of wine consumption) leading the way (2009: 25). In 1880, the United States reached peak annual per capita consumption of wine for the nineteenth century, at one gallon, with California producing about 75 percent of all the wine in the United States. In the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, a bit less than half of the wine output focused on fortified wines, with California again leading overall production (Mendelson 2009: 41, 46). The early history of Kentucky bourbon has been examined by historians in some detail, but studies after 1850 tend to be older, somewhat romanticized, and focus more on local issues and social history (Veach 2013 is an exception to this). The general trends in bourbon distilling between 1850 and the First World War mirrored Europe and the UK technologically, with bourbon producers introducing column stills late in the century, and adopting steam power, refrigeration, and pasteurization as the century closed. As in other alcohol-related industries in the United States, and like other elites in the South, families who manufactured bourbon tended to intermarry, creating dense interconnected family networks (Carson 2010: 84. See also Crowgey 2008). As with other distilled beverages, the late nineteenth-century bourbon industry saw a drastic increase in taxation and regulation after 1850, to the point that “distilling soon became the most regulated industry in the United States,” and with taxes generated by distilling “the largest source of income for the federal government” prior to the First World War (Veach 2013: 63). Whiskey distillers found increasing competition after 1860 with “rectifiers” who took cheap barrels of whiskey, often imported, and mixed them with other whiskeys or flavoring agents. The resultant product might be sold as something entirely new—perhaps akin to fortified wine—or it could be a fake copy passed off as an

Production 27

authentic brand (High and Coppin 1988: 290–1; Crowgey 2008: 133; Veach 2013: 45). The battle between the two groups—producers who made whiskey and sold it to retailers, and merchants who blended whiskey—in the legislative arena saw whiskey producers trying to protect their brand and rectifiers trying to protect their right to sell spirits. The Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 was an early attempt to set a standard definition of distilled spirits, and to guarantee quality. A specific reaction to rectifiers, the Act meant that manufacturers could print the “Bottled in Bond” status on a bottle if the contents were distilled in a single season, by a single distiller at a single distillery. Rectifiers could continue to “manufacture” their product, but there would be no government guarantee of authenticity (Hucklebridge 2014: 143). Even without that guarantee of quality, producers of blended whiskies controlled almost “90 percent of the market” (High and Coppin 1988: 291). The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 attempted to further clarify what manufacturers could call their spirits by creating the category of “straight whiskey” that contained no adulterants. The resultant lawsuits pitted American distillers (and ironically enough some temperance advocates, who viewed pure whiskey as less problematic than adulterated spirits) against rectifiers and distillers in Canada and the UK who worried that the law would force them to re-label their products. In 1909, the courts delineated between straight and blended whiskey, depending on the adulterants, and defined bourbon and rye by their ingredients (Veach 2013: 70–6). While distilled spirits manufacturers highlight some of the definitional issues for alcohol production in the period between 1850 and 1950, beer serves as an instructive lens through which to examine the differentiated growth in alcohol production in the United States prior to the end of the First World War. As Martin Stack argues, the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 is a logical dividing point in understanding the transformation of the brewing industry in the United States. Beer production in the United States rose from 1.7 million to 3.7 million barrels in the last two years of the war, probably due to wartime demand. St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Chicago supplied a great deal of beer to the western states while dozens or even hundreds of local breweries produced beer for neighborhoods and extended localities. But several factors prevented them from establishing themselves in the national beer market before the 1880s (Stack 2000: 437). First, in Chicago the Great Fire of 1871 caused more than $2 million in damages spread across at least nineteen breweries (Skilnik 2006: 24). This virtually wiped out the brewing industry in that city. Eager brewers in St. Louis and especially Milwaukee stepped up production and distribution to, and then built new facilities in, Chicago in order to fill the gap (Ogle 2006: 58). While the Chicago fire was an important factor in shifting production from a major metropolitan center to a developing town, the greatest hindrance to the expansion of American alcohol production in the nineteenth century was the lack of an efficient system of distribution in the American west, which before the 1880s prevented western manufacturers from dominating anything more than their local markets. While massive populations in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia provided a ready, local market for all forms of locally produced alcohol, access to outside markets proved difficult. As the railroad networks in the United States slowly improved before 1900, and as immigrants poured into the country, brewery output expanded greatly and as with distillers, local production gave way to factory output. Where more than 2,200 brewers produced 3.7 million barrels of beer in 1865, by 1895 the number of brewers had dropped to 1,771, but output had grown to more than

28 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

33 million barrels (Stack 2000: 437). Efficient rail networks for beer also meant efficient networks for ancillary industries, as, for example, the Willamette Valley became “one of the world’s leading hop exporters” due to excellent local soil and an efficient distribution rail and shipping network (Kopp 2011: 406). Martin Stack provides a logical four-square framework for understanding the changing nature of beer production in the United States prior to the First World War by dividing breweries along the lines of what he terms “large-scale shippers,” “large-scale local breweries,” “medium-sized shippers,” and “small-to-medium-sized local breweries” (Stack 2000: 439). This division seems to allow for more nuance in understanding production and distribution within their own context. Stack argues that Pabst serves as a useful example of the way in which a local brewery rode the wave of late pre-First World War technology and industrialization to become a “large-scale shipper” and for a time the largest brewery in the United States. The second largest American brewery at 121,000 barrels in 1877, Pabst was nonetheless a local distributor, serving Milwaukee, Chicago, Kansas City, and a few other Midwestern cities. In the early 1880s, Pabst started to manufacture its own ice, and in the 1870s and 1880s the company introduced mechanical bottle-washing and automated bottling systems, as well as a metal crown cap for the bottles. Decreased railroad transportation costs, along with the invention of refrigerated railroad cars, further extended the reach of Pabst beers (Stack 2000: 440–2). The construction of local beer depots allowed Pabst to store its beer prior to distribution, and the advent of the “tied house” system gave the company a ready outlet for its products (Duis 1999: 24–6). By the end of the 1880s, Pabst produced more than 800,000 barrels annually, and the company’s profits rose from between $17,000 and $200,000 in the 1870s to more than $1.5 million by the early 1890s (Stack 2000: 440–2). The distinction between large-scale and “medium-sized shippers,” according to Stack, is largely one of the scales of production and reach of distribution, with some distributing nationally, while others such as Hamm’s, Heileman, and Stroh’s produced larger quantities of beer but distributed regionally (Stack 2000: 444). These breweries generally adopted the same technologies as the larger brewers, and used those advantages to dominate regional markets and compete with local brewers. The Ehret Brewery in New York City represents Stack’s third category—the “large-local” breweries who increased production but focused on local distribution. The largest brewery in the United States in 1877 at 138,000 barrels, it consistently upgraded its production facilities while selling beer to New York City’s ever-increasing population. As a local producer, Ehret had no need for pasteurization, far-flung rail networks, or many of the scientific advances adopted by the large-scale shippers. However, artificial refrigeration allowed Ehret to free itself from expensive and unreliable ice to increase production. The other important factor for large-local brewers such as Ehret was to maintain a firmly established network of saloons through which it could distribute beer, and to continue to provide beer in less expensive kegs. In 1892 Ehret, despite (or perhaps because of) its local distribution, produced more than 400,000 barrels, and by 1892 was the fourth largest brewery in the country at 550,000 barrels (Baron 1962: 258; Stack 2000: 443). Finally, breweries in Stack’s “small- to medium-sized local” category included most breweries in the last half of the nineteenth century. Producing around 1,800 barrels of beer in the 1880s and distributing in its home town of Chippewa Falls, Leinekugel focused its energy

Production 29

Figure 1.2  Malthouse superintendent checking temperature at Pabst brewery, c. 1944. Photograph by Ed Clark/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images.

on high-quality beer and brand loyalty, doing so in a town in which it was the only brewer. Similar breweries operated in large cities around the United States where ready markets in neighborhood saloons allowed brewers to compete alongside breweries that fell into the other three categories. These breweries “generally sold their beer on tap in saloons,” many of which were formally or informally tied to the breweries (Stack 2000: 443).

30 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Figure 1.3  George Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery, undated. Established 1866. Lithograph by Trautmann, Bailey & Blampey, N.Y. Image by The New York Historical Society via Getty Images.

Breweries continued to expand production after the turn of the century becoming, as Stack notes, “one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the country” (2000: 448). While the number of US breweries continued to decline in the period from the turn of the century to the onset of national prohibition in 1920, annual beer production rose to 66 million barrels by the start of the First World War. Annual per capita consumption increased from fifteen

Production 31

gallons in 1895 to twenty-one gallons in 1913 (Stack 2000: 448). Most of the increase in twentieth-century beer production in the United States before national prohibition happened in breweries producing between 15,000 and 170,000 barrels per year, with most of the rest occurring in breweries that made more than 170,000 barrels per year (Stack 2000: 456). Much of that increase in production and consumption, however, occurred in the context of a lack of real growth among larger breweries. While Hiatt, Sine, and Tolbert see a direct link between increased temperance activity, particularly on the part of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the failure of breweries, Stack sees a more nuanced link between the twin forces of competitive local breweries as well as temperance and prohibition activists (See Hiatt et al. 2009: 635–67). As with brewing in the United States, winemaking underwent profound transformations driven by science and technology, albeit with significant differences. Like beer in the United States, locally produced wine rarely traveled far from its point of origin, and indeed the hallmark of viticulture is that growth of the base ingredient—in this case grapes—generally occurred on or very near to the same site where the alcohol was fermented. Likewise, low-quality wine, low rates of land ownership, poor transportation, and high taxation in France, Italy, and Spain—the largest producers of wine in the world—meant that in the nineteenth century most wineries sold their product within a few tens of miles of their vats (Simpson 2011: 21). Small family estates, worked by family members rather than contract laborers, took few risks and had little incentive to boost the quality of their products, while effective local political organization allowed wineries to protect their status quo. Where import restrictions in Great Britain favored Spanish and Italian wines over French, English wine consumption remained relatively flat in the half-century before 1914, even as the consumption of beer and spirits rose by more than 50 percent (although per capita consumption of spirits declined) (Briggs 1985: 71). As in the United States, the introduction of the railways changed the economic metrics of production in France. In the late 1850s, “French railways annually transported three million tons of wine and spirits” (Simpson 2011: 31). By the eve of the First World War, that number reached almost 9 million tons. Aside from lowering shipping costs, the expansion of the railways opened up new wine regions to production and prompted greater competition among European wineries as table wines from around Europe became more readily available. Indeed, exports from Spain show a steady growth over the last half of the nineteenth century before leveling off and then dropping slightly from 1900 to 1910, and then rising again before 1915 (Simpson 2011: 42). As another example, the construction of railroads in the Duoro region of Portugal expanded the prosperity of an area already famed for its fortified port wine (Macedo 2011: 159). Europe and the United States provide useful contrasts in railroad development, government support, and the alcohol industry. In general, railroad construction in European countries was a state-sponsored affair that in some cases was meant to specifically benefit national identity and regional wine-producing—as in the cases of Bordeaux and Duoro. In the United States, railroads received government support in the form of land grants but were otherwise engaged in competition with each other as private entities. Indeed some breweries, such as Anheuser-Busch and Schlitz, established their own rail lines (Baron 1962: 259–62). In all areas increased track mileage lifted the alcohol industry along with other sectors of the economy.

32 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Figure 1.4  Brewery Joseph Schlitz, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1900. Image by ullstein bild via Getty Images.

The expansion of rail-based distribution represented a double-edged sword in the production of wine as greater exposure to other regions brought increased risks. An ­ outbreak of powdery mildew on the grape vines in France was initially treated by introducing hybrid, disease-resistant American vines. In the 1840s, those American vines brought a devastating vine disease—phylloxera, which obliterated tens if not hundreds of millions of hectoliters of French production in the 1860s and 1870s before moving to Spain in the 1880s and Portugal soon after. The disease spread to Italy in the 1870s but never took hold there in the way it did elsewhere. Where breweries and distilleries in the United States, Europe, and the UK adopted scientific advances with an eye toward greater efficiency and product improvement, in French viticulture phylloxera forced the government and wine producers to turn to more scientific methods of crop management and production. Across Europe national governments gathered scientists and took action in an attempt to protect a vital national industry, and nationalism certainly played a factor in the early response to the disease, as countries and regions sought to protect their brand imagery by saving vines. While the government offered prizes of hundreds of thousands of francs for a cure, farmers spent billions more tearing out and replacing diseased vines and trying to eradicate the disease in what remained. Farmers across the region engaged in what Marta Macedo has called “chemical war,” bathing the soil in carbon disulfide and other harsh chemicals in an attempt to kill the aphids at the heart of the disease (2011: 166). Other farmers discovered that flooding their fields in the style of rice paddies helped to control, but not eradicate, the problem. Those remedies had little effect. By the 1880s, one answer to the disease had been found in its source—grafting disease-resistant American vines onto existing European regional varieties (Simpson 2011: 37). Although many growers fought this solution on

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Figure 1.5  Submersion of vineyards to fight against the phylloxera. France, 1939. Photograph by Boyer/Roger Viollet via Getty Images.

the grounds of the national purity of vines, grafting, while expensive, provided the most ­economical and safest long-term solution to the problem. To say that phylloxera and the reaction to it changed wine production in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be an understatement. The phylloxera outbreak was at the center, and in some ways the source, of all major changes in wine production in that period. Unlike in beer production in the United States, and spirits production in Great Britain and the Americas, scientific innovation was thrust upon European winemakers as the phylloxera outbreak forced governments to react on a national level and to propose nationally driven scientific solutions to rescue a critical economic and cultural industry. While French vines recovered after the 1880s, the industry as a whole suffered from price instability brought on by expanded acreage, cheaper transportation costs that promoted the mixing of imported wine with local to offset poor quality, and an overall influx of cheap artificial wines. French wine production fell so dramatically that “the country switched from being a net exporter to an importer in 1879,” and remained so for most of the rest of the century (Simpson 2011: 41). As a result of the outbreak, winemakers in affected areas encouraged scientific innovation, while those in as-yet-unaffected areas stepped up production to meet increased demand, shipping their products via the newly expanded rail networks. Tariff structures shifted in response as devastated local industries sought protection. Finally, the longstanding practice of blending low-quality local wines with imports came under fire as producers reacted by looking, as they had in the midst of the phylloxera outbreak, for state help in defining their

34 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

products. The result was a 1905 law, not unlike the US Bottled in Bond Act, that “provided the legal framework to establish regional appellations” that would help combat the practice of fraudulent mislabeling and clearly delineate regional wines as a means of boosting local producers (Simpson 2005: 550).

Africa By the early twentieth century, beer production in the United States and Europe had largely completed the shift from small batches made at home to that produced through largescale industrial processes. In France, wine production remained firmly in the hands of smaller producers, while in Great Britain and the United States distilling was trending toward large-scale production. The days of kitchen alcohol were largely over, replaced by modern machinery and mass production. The shift from home to industrial alcohol production served as a dominant theme in Africa as well, although African nations found themselves, to one degree or another, beset by nearly uncontrollable external pressures not seen in the United States or Europe. Africans in various nations along the western coast had been fermenting palm wine and brewing grain-based beer for centuries and production of both liquors was a gender-based activity (Curto 2004: 24–5). Palm wine, made from the raffia plant, was largely a male, outdoor activity, while the production of grain-based beer was a female activity that occurred in the kitchens. And while Simon Heap notes the existence of a small commercial distillery in Nigeria likely producing rum for a few years in the 1880s, industrial-scale production of the kind that developed after the 1500s in Europe or in the Americas after colonial settlement did not exist before the twentieth century (Heap 1996: 72). The reasons were related to the nature and use of the alcohol produced by coastal western Africans. Both palm wine and grain-based fermented beverages contained relatively low percentages of alcohol, and little aside from the alcohol itself to act as a preservative. As a result, both types of alcohol had to be consumed within a few days in order to avoid spoilage. Alcohol consumption in coastal western Africa was also a communal affair, and production and consumption therefore occurred locally and in groups. Up through the early twentieth century, as David J. Parkin argues in writing about eastern Africa, any large-scale production of palm wine (and by extension grain-based beer) was “dependent on a local and neighbourhood labour force” and because the producers were almost certainly also the consumers, it required producers to maintain “cordial relations with the men who constitute the labour force” (1972: 10). As a result, production and consumption were proximate group activities. The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed what is commonly referred to as the “Partition of Africa,” or the “Scramble for Africa,” where European powers competed to exercise control over the African continent, its peoples, and its resources. As European countries worked to divide and control the continent, their ideas and attitudes about alcohol, and alcohol production, were influenced by their preconceived notions about Africa and Africans (Pan 1975). As A. Olorunfemi argues, liquor production in British West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sat squarely “between two powerful British pressure groups” (1984: 229). Temperance advocates comprised both humanitarian groups and cotton factors borrowed the language of anti-slave trade crusaders to argue that health and moral concerns should limit both trade and

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production in British-held areas. Standing in opposition, liquor producers and merchants saw ­alcohol as a useful means of colonial domination (Korieh 2003: 114). Prior to the Scramble, production and trade in alcohol in western Africa attracted ineffective opposition. The onset of direct imperial control changed that, as former African nations became colonies subject to different pressures and regulations. More importantly, at the dawn of the twentieth century alcohol production and trade in British and French Africa were bound up in an increased sense of urgent competition with Germany. For the British government as well, customs duties on imported alcohol served as a major source of revenue in West Africa, averaging more than 50 percent of total revenue in Lagos, and more than 60 percent of the total revenue in Nigeria in the period between 1894 and 1918 (Olorunfemi 1984: 237, 238). Two factors contributed to a change in patterns of consumption and production in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, the establishment of Europeanstyle urban centers, and an increase in population, changed drinking patterns among colonial Africans (Akyeampong 1996a: 53–62). Individual, private consumption, particularly among men, replaced communal gatherings in rural areas, while Western-style nightclubs, saloons, and pubs attracted larger crowds of urban dwellers. As rates of drinking rose, and as Muslim-dominated areas of western Africa battled increased drinking, alarmed Europeans at the Brussels Conference in 1890 responded by declaring a prohibition on imported spirits in British- and German-controlled areas in East and Central Africa. Other areas saw the imposition of stiff import tariffs designed to limit imported alcohol. In Portuguese-controlled Africa “the old colonial rum industry” became the “metropolitan wine industry, which now specialized in an extremely alcoholic ‘colonial wine’” manufactured locally (Clarence-Smith 1979: 177). In French-controlled Côte d’Ivoire, local French officials feared that palm wine (so-called “African Bordeaux”) production would divert valuable palm sap from oil to alcohol production, and that “backward” Africans would misspend their money (White 2007: 670). Alcohol served as a form of currency in many local areas, and domestically produced grain beer proved impossible to control as traders who did not include alcohol in their dealings found it difficult to expand into new territories. Moreover, local British officials required a source of revenue to fund their colonial offices, and for all European powers, “access to alcohol did represent power” (Schler 2002: 316). As tariff rates increased, imports and revenue at first declined. The result, unsurprisingly in hindsight, was an increase in domestically produced alcohol in rural areas, which Europeans generally did not regulate except through an effort to tax (Heap 1998: 29). As a result, and somewhat alarmingly for those who saw the restrictions the Brussels Conference imposed on European manufacturers and merchants as a way to bring civilization to Africa, western Africans began to distil palm wine in the 1920s. For western Africans locally produced distilled palm wine “gin” solved the problem of supply and demand as European imports dwindled or got more expensive (Korieh 2003: 116–17). At the same time social and economic pressures begat more occasions in which to drink (Akyeampong 1996b: 58–62). For European governments in non-prohibition zones, revenues on locally produced alcohol generated revenue for the colonies. Alcohol manufacturing of the type seen in factories in Europe or the Americas after the turn of the century was quite limited. Simon Heap notes the existence of small operations that took imported alcohol and added flavorings and water before reselling it. These

36 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

“compounded spirits” mirrored the “rectifying” that went on in the United States. In fact, as Heap notes, import tariffs charged duties on alcohol percentage prior to “home consumption,” freeing compounders to import high-gravity spirits and water them down, thus increasing their profits (1998: 73–4). As in Europe and the United States, Africans generally considered beer to be a safe and healthy alternative to spirits. In this atmosphere, as well as in the context of a need to selffund the colony, the Southern Nigerian Government in 1912 applied for a patent to open a brewery in the capitol, Lagos. The British government, eager to promote local industry as well as a source of revenue, seemed receptive, but protracted negotiations, the outbreak of the First World War, and then an economic downturn in the 1920s prevented any action (Heap 1998: 80). Despite all this, beer production and drinking increased in Africa from 1900 to 1930, which may have been linked to mechanization and better grain harvests (Heap 1998; Korieh 2003; McAllister 2006).

The War Years Home production was beginning, albeit slowly, to give way to the first stirrings of industrial manufacturing. A temperance movement exerted pressure to curb alcohol manufacture. Just as the First World War delayed the opening of the first production brewery in Lagos, the European war that spilled into the rest of the world had dramatic effects on liquor production. In fact, alcohol production in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by two factors—two world wars and worldwide depression. The onset of the First World War in 1914 brought major changes to alcohol production to every country in Europe and the Americas. In some cases, as in Europe, this was due to the physical devastation of war. In the United States pressures from temperance and prohibition advocates steered that country toward national prohibition. In many countries the demands for grain and other raw materials for the war effort led to a shift in production. In sub-Saharan Africa, the net effect of the war years from 1914 to 1950 was to delay the onset of industrial alcohol production, as colonial powers found themselves distracted by events in Europe. In equatorial Nigeria during the Second World War, imports from continental Europe declined sharply to zero by 1943, while imports from Great Britain slowly declined but never fully ended. Imports from North America rose sharply in 1941 and 1942, but then also declined and finally ended by 1948 (Heap 1998: 81). Localized production worked to fill the demand, although it would not be until the end of the war, and especially after 1950, that colonial disruption and attendant shortages in supply would spur local production (Akyeampong 1996a: 229). The meager production in mostly Muslim North African nations, likewise, has been little-studied, with major influences occurring in the desert campaigns of the Second World War. Both of those regions await new examinations by historians of alcohol. In European countries the period from 1914 to 1950 brought expected chaos. In France, for example, wine and spirits suffered greatly. As noted by Leo Loubére, the First World War broke out at the beginning of the grape harvest, robbing the vineyards of workers, draft animals, and wagons, and leaving women and children to bring in a record-breaking 1914 crop (1990: 17). Unlike beer and distilled beverages, the grain for which would be needed for wartime food supplies, wine grapes had no other natural market. In fact, wine production

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during wartime could be seen as superfluous, taking away arable land and valuable labor from other wartime crops and industries. The response among grape-growers was to tout their product as innately healthy, and therefore necessary for soldiers (Loubére 1990: 17). Government contracts had the potential to rescue, or at least prevent the death of, an industry only just recovering from phylloxera. Instead high taxes on what the French government considered a luxury item, closed markets, and a battlefield that ran across some of France’s most important wine regions stifled or ended production entirely. In particular the occupation of Alsace and battles in Reims and the Marne in Champagne destroyed thousands of acres of vineyards. The interwar years saw something of a return to prosperity for French wine producers. A greater focus on terroir and an effort to tie wines to a regional identity contributed to greater exports in the 1920s, especially in Burgundy (Whalen 2009: 73). In that region folklorists, historians, viticulturalists, and even religious authorities worked “to link viticultural ceremonies to ancient traditions” (Whalen 2009: 77). Local festivals and fairs, aimed at tourists and with an eye toward export sales, featured supposedly longstanding cultural practices that emphasized the heritage of the region and the link between wine production and almost every facet of French and Burgundian culture. What began in Burgundy eventually spread across France, and a national wine heritage became a key selling point of French culture and, more importantly, French wine. Record harvests in the late 1920s and the mid-1930s helped exports, and over the course of the 1930s French wines became increasingly profitable as exports and domestic consumption both grew. The Second World War brought another setback as the Vichy government sought to impose tighter control of the French economy. This included a ban on the production of non-grape-based aperitifs in 1940 and an outright ban on advertising distilled spirits in 1941. The Germans alternated between outright confiscation of wine and purchasing at greatly reduced prices. A need for self-sufficiency on the part of farmers, a lack of herbicides and pesticides, and continuing armed conflict led to an overall deterioration in acreage as well as the quality of available wine in France 1941–5 (Loubére 1990: 33). In Great Britain the first decades of the twentieth century, and especially war years from 1914 to 1950, contributed to the further decline in spirits production seen in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Weir 1989: 378). From a high point of a bit more than 37 million proof-gallons sold domestically in 1900, spirits declined to just under 26 million proof-­gallons on the eve of the First World War. Wartime production was hobbled by both the needs of wartime industries at home and protective tariffs imposed on luxury goods by allies. While the end of the war should have brought a boost in production and consumption, American Prohibition closed off a lucrative market for European imports, threatening the recovery of the industry. Likewise the high tariffs and an ongoing temperance campaign in the UK and Europe reduced domestic demand in the UK by 3.6 percent each year from 1900 to 1934 (Weir 1989: 379). Brewers in the UK—who had suffered since 1880 under tariffs that taxed beer by original gravity—also suffered from criticism prior to 1914 that they were contributing to public alcohol abuse. After 1914 they endured charges of threatening the war effort. In response they reduced the average alcohol content of their beer by as much as a full percentage point ABV between 1900 and 1945 (Hornsey 2003: 568). Then in 1915 and then again in 1917, the Home Office floated serious proposals to nationalize alcohol production and guarantee

38 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

pre-war profits (Turner 1980: 589). Neither effort came to fruition, but both events reflect the problematic nature of alcohol production and consumption in the wartime decades of the twentieth century. The 1915 proposal was meant to help wartime industries beset by worker absenteeism, while in 1917 fears over wartime food shortages led to renewed calls for nationalization. In both instances the proposals were met with some acceptance by a brewing industry threatened with a decline in production fueled by wartime pressures, higher tariffs, and an influential temperance movement. But both efforts failed in the midst of overall industry resistance (particularly on the part of distillers), political squabbling, and varied wartime demands. Even so the Central Control Board, created in 1915, restricted sales of alcohol in and around areas with war-critical facilities such as munitions factories and shipping ports. Producers of Scotch whisky in the UK responded to the overall decline in consumption and production in two ways. First, the industry consolidated between 1920 and 1936, then slowly expanded again through 1942. Where all thirty-six malt whiskey distilleries had been individually owned in 1874, by 1927 six companies owned twenty-seven of the seventy-three distilleries, and by 1936 five companies owned fifty-one of the seventy-three malt whiskey distilleries. All five companies belonged to the amalgam Distillers Company, Ltd or DCL. By the middle of the Second World War, production had increased—mostly on the backs of exports and especially cash-rich American servicemen arriving in the UK to help fight the

Figure 1.6  Whisky in Scotland. Stillman Sandy Phillips polishes the gleaming copper stills where the spirit is vaporized by heat in the UK, c. 1940. Photograph by Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

Production 39

war—and so had the number of distilleries. Nonetheless in 1942 eleven companies controlled fifty-eight malt whiskey distilleries. The numbers for grain whiskey producers are even more stark. In 1900, the DCL owned eight of the twenty-seven grains distillers in the UK. By 1927 it controlled twenty-four of twenty-seven (Weir 1989: 380). Diversification had a greater impact on production in the first half of the twentieth century. As demand for alcohol declined, and as wartime and post-war pressures mounted, alcohol industries with the resources to invest responded by diversifying into related industries such as pharmaceuticals, anti-freeze, fuel, and synthetics. Of the many alcohol producers in the UK, the DCL was the most successful, seeing growth of around 10 percent each year from 1915 through 1939. Where in 1905 DCL was barely in the top fifty of the largest companies by capital in the UK, in 1948, due to diversification and wartime demand for scotch whiskey, it was the fourth (Weir 1989: 381). In the United States the years leading up to the First World War saw an increase in anti-alcohol campaigning. The cause of temperance coincided with an industrializing economy, increasing technological efficiency, and an emerging middle class who viewed drunkenness, and especially spirituous liquors, as an impediment to progress and a threat to “traditional” American values (Pegram 1998: 88). What originated as forces for temperance focused more and more on outright legal prohibition. During the First World War beer, heretofore considered a “safe” alternative to spirits, became a particular target associated with German culture and an overall waste of grain. Progressive forces then scored a victory with the enactment of Constitutional Prohibition in 1920. Alcohol producers sought to move into other industries, with some, such as Coors Brewing, turning to the ancillary industries of glass and ceramic production in an attempt to remain afloat. Others produced foodstuffs, but most could not adapt and went out of business before repeal in 1933. In Kentucky during Prohibition in the 1920s, by contrast, Lewis Rosenthal incorporated the Schenley Distillers Corporation, producing small amounts of medicinal whiskey and buying up shuttered distilleries and warehouses with an eye toward the hoped-for end of Prohibition (Purcell 1998: 65). As in the UK, industry consolidation had a profound effect on production, albeit with the twist of Prohibition, as the 1930s witnessed the surviving American brewers and distillers restarting production and preventing smaller producers from effectively entering the national market. Beer production saw moderate growth over the course of the 1930s, with the big jump occurring from 1933 to 1935, where shipments rose almost 52 percent. From 1935 to 1939 shipments rose almost 23 percent (McGahan 1991: 230). Overall alcohol consumption, however, remained below pre-Prohibition levels, as an economic depression and lingering temperance sentiments helped tamp down demand. Where Americans consumed twenty-one gallons annually per capita in 1914, that consumption never rose above 12.6 annually in the 1930s, meaning that much of the production was headed outside of US borders (McGahan 1991: 251). In response, many brewers and distillers who celebrated the end of Prohibition as saving their livelihood nonetheless shuttered their businesses soon after repeal. Others turned to better production technology to help save on costs. The Second World War in Europe at first revived the hopes of American prohibitionists optimistic that patriotism and the demands of the war effort could bring the same success as in 1920. A bill to prohibit the sale of alcohol to military personnel gained some traction in May 1941, but was ultimately defeated. Having absorbed the lessons of the First World War,

40 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

brewers and distillers in the Second World War took great pains to publicize their contributions to the war effort, especially in the realm of tax receipts. The pressures of supplying the British war effort, along with a growing sense of inevitability, led distillers in late 1941 to design a plan to convert distilleries to wartime production. The attack on Pearl Harbor killed the formal plan but led American distillers to, by October 1942, voluntarily convert their plants to the manufacture of wartime supplies. As with the DCL in the UK, American distillers manufactured precursor alcohol for products as varied as synthetic rubber to replace natural rubber imported from Japanese-held areas, smokeless gunpowder, and fuel (Purcell 1998: 74). Brewers in the United States and UK saw a different war than distillers. As a source of tax receipts and as a refreshing beverage for factory workers, beer came to be seen as an essential tool of the war effort. Through their advertising, brewers sought to undercut one of their greatest foes by promoting beer as a drink to be enjoyed by men and women, with women especially shown as forces of moderate drinking (Corzine 2010: 844). Likewise the war years saw tightly regulated supplies of grain force brewers to attenuate their strong beers, which suited the changing palates of American men and women and led to a longterm trend in beer production from 1945 to 1990. Ironically, the divergent paths of the producers of two types of alcohol in the United States led to two very different post-war paths. Distillers, having converted to wartime production and enjoying government-subsidized and protected supplies and makers, emerged from the war in largely the same state as they entered: somewhat consolidated but fairly diverse. Brewers, on the other hand, suffered from market forces outside of their control. As a result the industry there began a trend of very sharp consolidation that would continue for the next several decades (McGahan 1991: 265).

Conclusion Overall, the period from 1850 to 1950 witnessed a number of changes in production driven by technology, science, general industry trends, temperance forces, and war. Some changes came out of necessity, as in the way that phylloxera wrecked production and pushed French wine producers toward a different scientific approach to viticulture. Other changes cut across a broad geography in alcohol production, as technological innovation—in steam power, railroads, refrigeration, and a new type of still—helped transform the industry in Europe, Great Britain, and the Americas. Two world wars had profound, immediate effects on European alcohol production, while bringing about different changes in the United States. By 1950 the alcohol industry in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States would hardly have been recognizable to someone from the mid-nineteenth century.

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42

2 CONSUMPTION JAMES KNEALE

Introduction Between 1850 and 1950, observers around the world described the growing intoxication they saw around them as the result of a shift from what was understood as “traditional” drinking to a newer culture of consumption. However, traditional drinking turns out to be something of a chimera. Many characteristics of this newer culture were in existence well before this period and, while consumption rose and fell in many places, this period was generally drier than the eighteenth century. Nevertheless it is worth considering the arguments that were made about this shift, as they have shaped the historiography of alcohol consumption in the age of industry and empire. After introducing these ideas, we will consider what is known about consumption, about drinkers and drinking occasions, and finally about drinking places and practices. “Traditional” drinking was associated with the rhythms of holidays and rites of passage, but between 1850 and 1950 drinking became much more regular in Europe, and perhaps elsewhere; distilled liquor became more available and affordable. Traditional drinking seemed strongest in the countryside, and weakest in urban centers. In Tsarist Russia, “in the village … drinking was not centered around a specific site, and it did not separate people by age, gender, or income to the extent more modern drinking did” (Transchel 2006: 21). Evaluations of traditional drinking varied, however. On the one hand, in some places— particularly colonial Africa—it was thought to unite social groups, and newer customs were felt to bring disorder. In Southern Africa this idea informed ethnographies and histories of drink from the 1930s (Ambler and Crush 1992). In fact alcohol could simultaneously support and threaten social order; in East Africa older men’s “controlled, ritual” drinking co-existed with reports of the drunken violence of younger men (Willis 2002: 47). Similarly Paul Nugent suggests that “competing visions of modernity … played themselves out in attitudes towards alcohol in West Africa and South Africa alike” (2014: 145). On the other hand, social historians of Britain saw traditional drinking as a source of disorder; industrial capitalism sought to tame an unruly popular culture, and employers supported temperance because drink was “the most dangerous agent of destruction of laboring power” (Gramsci 1971: 303). Industrial cities represented the front line of this struggle as capitalist discipline confronted a traditional festive culture and rural migrants were shaped into proletarians. When Welsh Eisteddfods became established in pubs, they drew the attention of reformers for this reason (Pritchard 2012). From this perspective the rise and fall of alcohol consumption in Europe, North America, Russia, and elsewhere in this period represent the liberating and repressive consequences of capital. However, drink historians

have been slow to engage with newer ideas about the timing and consequences of both work-discipline and paid employment (Glennie and Thrift 2009; Zelizer 2011). In many influential accounts distillation was the most important element of a new drinking culture. David Christian suggests that “distilled drinks were to fermented drinks what guns were to bows and arrows: instruments of a potency unimaginable in most traditional societies” (1990: 33); Wolfgang Schivelbusch agrees that “gin struck the typically beer-drinking English populace like a thunderbolt” (1993: 156). However, while Schivelbusch argues that “the maximised effect, the acceleration, and the reduced price made liquor a true child of the Industrial Revolution” (1993: 153), distillation is an early modern technique, and the first European concerns over its use come before the period we are examining here. We should also be wary of the idea that these different drinking cultures reflected a tension between the rhythms of industrial and rural life. In England and Wales both clock-time—a shared and public sense of time—and a preindustrial urban work time-discipline predated, and were not the result of, industrialization as E. P. Thompson (1967) had claimed (Harrison 1986; Glennie and Thrift 2009). Neither the still nor work discipline was industrial, then. Even in Britain few cities were genuinely industrial before the middle of the nineteenth century; industrial drinks arrived quite some way before “industrial drinking,” and in many places “traditional” drinking co-existed with the new craze for distilled spirits for quite some time. Colonial contact and imperial conquest heightened the novelty of new drinking substances and practices. By 1850 many cultures had long been producers of their own alcoholic beverages, from Africa to Central America (Pan 1975; Carey 2015), but a cash economy freed brewing and drinking from the rhythms of the seasons, as it did for Swazi women brewers (Crush 1992). In other places, like the Pacific, Europeans had introduced both fermented and distilled alcoholic drinks long before 1850 (Marshall and Marshall 1975) but these did not always become ordinary commodities. In Papua New Guinea drugs like betel and kava were well known before contact, but “alcohol was always treated as a substance apart” (Marshall 1982: 8). In Africa the threat of alien European “trade liquor” persuaded the imperial powers that Africans needed to be protected from distilled drinks (Pan 1975; Willis 2001). However, in East Africa what Europeans saw as traditional “native” drinking continued to evolve through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the availability of imported or local spirits was in fact only one of the three dynamics that shaped alcohol consumption in colonial Africa, alongside the growth of centralized states and the spread of money (Willis 2002: 23–40; 2003b). Turning to the locations in which drink was consumed, while places devoted to drinking had of course existed for centuries, this period saw them becoming increasingly important, and perhaps increasingly specialized. By 1850 public drinking in Ireland had to be done within the “confined and regulated space of the government-licensed drinkshop” (Malcolm 1998: 72). Similarly, Justin Willis sees the East African bar, shaped by colonial regulation, as “a place to drink which was regulated and formalized and set aside; a place to drink, just as the hospital was a place to be ill and the court was a place to judge” (2002: 156). These drinking places may have become increasingly like the “third places” described by Ray Oldenburg (1989). Neither home nor work, these inclusive “great good places” offered respite in otherwise unfriendly cities, and were key locations for the formation of civil society and social capital. Nathan Booth shows that mid-nineteenth-century Cheshire pubs provided a comfortable, domestic sociability somewhere between the public and private,

44 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

for example (2018). While not by any means new, between 1850 and 1950 these associations may well have been strengthened by the specialization of space brought about by increasing urban size and complexity, as well as restrictions on workplace drinking and the poor quality of home life. However, the relations between first, second, and third places still troubled critics who felt drinking places encouraged absenteeism and diverted time and money away from homes. Having sketched out some of the key dimensions of changes to drinking in this period, it is time to consider the evidence for changing consumption rates.

Known Consumption Rates, 1850–1950 Despite the fact that governments took a good deal of interest in drinking, our knowledge of consumption rates is partial and uncertain in this period. Consumption itself is rarely if ever recorded; state taxation records measure production, imports and exports, and sales, and these figures are often used as proxies for consumption, although illicit production could be an enormous problem for governments everywhere. There are also many problems with state records (Dingle 1972; Brennan 1989; Fahey 2003). Changing borders make it difficult to track national consumption. Drinks were sold in different volumes and strengths; these can be converted into a standard measure (usually liters of pure alcohol), although some historians have calculated per capita figures based only on the drinking population, while others consider the total population. Perhaps most importantly, per capita consumption figures tell us nothing about how much individuals or groups drank, or how they drank it. Here we have to rely on even less reliable proxies like counts of drink-related crimes and nuisances, deaths associated with alcohol, or numbers of drink retailers. For these reasons and others, some historians have been skeptical of the value of consumption data. For example, Kate Transchel suggests “[Russian] figures are suspect because all published studies of alcohol consumption were designed for a political purpose” (2006: 28). Similarly, consumption data from Southern Africa reflected white assumptions (Ambler and Crush 1992). However, all sources are inevitably shaped by their makers, and we might take heart from Brian Harrison’s observation that “historians do not usually allow themselves to be discouraged by lack of firm evidence. Some sort of general picture … can be built up from scattered and incidental contemporary references” (1971: 22). This section will attempt to construct just such a general picture, drawing on Rorabaugh’s collection of statistics for twelve American and European states from about 1830 to 1974 (1979: 237–9, see Table 2.1) as well as other studies and countries beyond this sample (adapted from Rorabaugh, Table A2.4, 1979: 239). In the United States annual per capita consumption had been 13.2 liters of absolute alcohol in 1800; this rose to a peak of 14.8 liters in 1830 but had fallen to 3.8 liters by 1850. It rose slightly after that but its highest point between 1850 and 1950 (6.4 liters, 1910) was less than half of the 1800 level. During Prohibition it was around 2.3 liters, although rates climbed after 1933, with the average rate for those of drinking age reaching 5.3 liters in 1950. The proportion of this alcohol derived from beer rose throughout this period, and by 1890 the shares contributed by beer and whiskey were equal (Rorabaugh 1979: 232). Again, it seems likely that consumption was falling in Canada from the start of this period. By 1890 it was 3 liters of absolute alcohol per capita (Rorabaugh 1979: 239), although there

Consumption 45

Table 2.1  Alcohol consumption, liters of absolute alcohol per capita, 1844–5 to 1954

Country USA

1844–5

1861–70

1881–90

1901–5

1919–22

1937

1954

3.8

4.9

4.9

5.7

2.3

4.2

6.8

2.3

2.3

4.2

4.2

9.8

10.6

11.0

6.1

4.2

6.4

10.2

8.3

3.0

2.3

3.0

1.9

0.4

1.5

1.9

2.3

2.6

1.9

2.3

2.3

Canada UK

3.0

Denmark Finland Norway Sweden

14.0

5.3

Netherlands Germany France Italy

14.8

14.4

4.5

4.9

3.0

3.4

3.8

6.4

5.7

3.0

1.5

1.9

8.7

9.8

2.6

4.2

3.8

16.3

21.6

17.8

21.6

20.1

13.2

15.5

13.6

9.8

12.9

1.1

3.0

Poland (adapted from Rorabaugh, Table A2.4, 1979: 239)

was a good deal of regional variation: the Maritime provinces consumed far less than British Columbia in 1880 (Cafferky 2003a: 22). Prohibition, state controls, and Depression kept consumption low until the 1940s (Rorabaugh 1979: 239). Consumption was also falling in Russia, where most of the alcohol consumed was in the form of vodka until beer became more popular after 1900. Between 1864 and 1879 the per capita rate was 4.3 liters of pure alcohol per annum. This then fell until the 1890s, when 2.4 liters of vodka per capita marked the lowest point of alcohol consumption in pre-­revolutionary Russia, before rising slightly again before the First World War. Wartime temperance, continued by the Bolsheviks, depressed drinking further, with per capita vodka consumption at 0.9 liters of pure alcohol in 1925, 1.0 liters in 1932, 1.9 liters in 1940, and 1.85 liters in 1950 (Krasnov 2003: 14–15). Before 1917 St Petersburg and Moscow recorded higher rates than the rest of the empire, but while the revolution brought changes to the habits of working-class drinkers in St Petersburg (Phillips 2000), older customs may have prevailed in Moscow, Kharkov, Saratov, and Tomsk (Transchel 2006). The Scandinavian countries also sobered fairly rapidly, although Norway lagged behind. Swedish per capita consumption declined markedly after 1850—from 14 to 5.3 liters of absolute alcohol between 1844–5 and 1861–70—and this continued through the twentieth century, reaching 3.8 liters by 1950 (Rorabaugh 1979: 239). While the high point of Danish consumption came in the middle of the nineteenth century, this also declined rapidly, from 10.2 liters in 1881–90 to a low point of 2.3 liters in 1937, as the result of high taxation and beer’s popularity at the expense of spirits (Rorabaugh 1979: 239; Eriksen 2003a: 193–4). In Finland consumption fell from 3 liters of pure alcohol per annum per capita in the 1870s to 1.9 liters in 1900, reaching 0.5 liters before Prohibition (1919), one of the lowest levels in Europe at that time. After Prohibition ended in 1932 per capita consumption was 1 liter (Rorabaugh 1979: 239; Österberg 2003: 240). In Norway, however, rates remained relatively high until the First World War. In 1851 per capita consumption for those aged fifteen or more stood at 5.5 liters of absolute alcohol, and this rose and fell (nearly 7 liters in 1875,

46 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

only 3.5 in 1887) until 1900 (Nordlund 2003: 460). Wartime controls and forms of prohibition between 1919 and 1926 may have had a longer-term influence, as consumption fluctuated between 1.1 and 3.1 liters per capita for those aged fifteen or older between 1926 and 1950. In Britain high levels of consumption in the eighteenth century gave way to more moderate drinking at the start of the nineteenth. The liberalization of the sale of spirits and beer in the 1820s and 1830s spurred small increases in consumption but the 1840s marked a low point. Consumption then rose, recording its highest levels in the 1870s and a second, lower, rise in the 1890s; from that point on it declined rapidly, as it had in other European countries (Wilson 1940). Government intervention encouraged extremely low levels during the First World War, but consumption was already falling steeply and continued to do so until the 1930s; at both of these low points per capita consumption was around 4 liters of absolute alcohol. Consumption rose again in the 1940s but after the Second World War it was again about 4 liters per capita. Why did British drinking change after the 1870s? Anthony Dingle notes that while wages were rising at the start of this decade, especially for skilled workers, there was little to spend them on. The 1870s peak represented “a situation in which purchasing power had temporarily outstripped the supply of consumer goods available” (1972: 618). In the first half of the 1870s, real purchasing power came from higher wages, so drink remained good value; but from 1880 to 1895, purchasing power was derived from falling prices, and drink became relatively expensive compared to other commodities. Higher wages favored male workers while lower prices meant the householder had more control over purchasing. After 1900 real wages stagnated, but families drank less alcohol to allow them to continue their new consumption habits. Elsewhere in Europe wide variations were visible, both in terms of the amount consumed and in rates of change. The citizens of Belgium continued to drink heavily, for example; in 1900 this was 12.5 liters of pure alcohol per capita, with spirits contributing 4.7 liters of this total (Karlsson and Österberg 2003: 103). Their neighbors in the Netherlands consumed around 7 liters of pure alcohol per capita in 1880, 5.7 liters in 1901–5, and about 2 liters in 1950 (Rorabaugh 1979: 239; Garretsen, Bongers, and van de Goor 2003: 450). In Austria the consumption of spirits peaked at around 10 liters per capita in the middle of the ­nineteenth century, with beer becoming increasingly important after this, especially in Vienna. The high point of overall consumption came in the years between 1881 and 1910 when per capita consumption reached around 11 liters of pure alcohol; between the wars this figure was only 6 liters (Eisenbach-Stangl 2003: 79). In Germany alcohol consumption rose from a low point in the 1840s to a peak of 10.2 liters of pure alcohol per capita in the early 1870s, following rising real wages until industrial depression in that decade (Roberts 1984: 43–4). Real wages recovered in the mid-1890s, although alcohol consumption began a sustained decline falling from 9.1 liters in 1900 to 6.9 in 1913—only a little more than the 1850 figure of 6.4 liters. As in many other northern European countries, beer’s popularity had risen at the expense of spirits (Roberts 1984: 109). In all the countries considered above, the per capita consumption of alcohol declined over this period, reflecting changing habits, wider social developments, and the influence of temperance. The French case is rather different, with consumption remaining very high throughout this period, dipping only when depression or war interfered with the production and sale of drink. In 1848–50 each French adult consumed 26.8 liters of pure alcohol,

Consumption 47

in 1900–2 this was 34.7 liters, and in 1950–1 the “involuntary detoxification” of war and occupation had reduced this to 28.6 liters (Prestwich 1988: 24, 257). There were important regional differences, though; consumption was highest in the north and the Midi, associated with beer and wine production respectively, and in some urban or industrial areas. As per capita consumption rose between 1850 and 1900, it was more evenly divided across the population, as peasants caught up with urban workers (Brennan 1989). The French pattern was even more unusual after 1900, when consumption fell in many other Western European nations. However, Italy seems to have followed a similar trajectory, recording high levels from 1881–90 as well as an increase in the first few years of the twentieth century, when most other European countries were turning away from alcohol. While consumption fell between the wars, and did not reach French levels, this pattern reminds us that not every European nation sobered up in the first half of the twentieth century. Australia followed a similar path to Britain after the first years of colonization. Consumption then declined in both New South Wales and Victoria before rising to peak figures of 7.0 and 11.0 liters respectively in the 1850s (Lewis 1992: 9). After the 1850s consumption declined fairly steadily in both colonies, and while intercolonial variations were recorded from the 1880s, with Western Australia recording the highest rates (Dingle 1980: 233), by federation (1901) Australians were drinking less than the British. The lowest point was reached in the 1930s, although by 1950 consumption had risen to around 6.0 liters per capita, more or less the rate recorded by New South Wales a century earlier. Other British colonies were certainly drinking less than the British by the 1890s, with the Cape of Good Hope and New Zealand recording only 46.3 and 35.6 percent of the pure alcohol consumed per capita in Britain (Rowntree and Sherwell 1899: 436). Published work on alcohol consumption elsewhere around the world is much patchier for this period, at least in Anglophone historical work. Justin Willis notes, “We have absolutely no idea of how much alcohol was consumed in East Africa in the nineteenth century … There is just as little real information for most of the twentieth century” (2002: 4). There are no figures for Indian alcohol consumption either, although numbers of licensed distilleries and liquor shops greatly increased between the 1870s and 1920s (Tyrrell 2003: 309). These consumption rates tell us nothing about who actually consumed alcohol, when they drank, how, or with whom. The next sections aim to answer these questions, beginning with drinkers and then examining drinking occasions.

Drinkers David Fahey’s sketch of British drinking is a useful starting point: “Nobody challenges the broad outlines of the orthodox view: the working class drank more than other classes, men drank more than women, and thus working-class men drank the most” (2003: 16). However, this was not always true everywhere, and we also need to remember that not everybody drank, even where there were no laws to forbid them doing so. The drinking of elites is also harder to track, especially masculine drinkers, as concerns over their consumption were less well-developed; however, archaeological and material culture studies can provide some clues (Glanville and Lee 2007; Mosher and Wilkie 2010). We will consider issues of class, gender, and “race” in turn, although some have been covered elsewhere in this volume.

48 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Figure 2.1  Outside a public house, London, c. 1903. From George R. Sims, Living London, Vol. II (Cassell and Company Ltd, London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne, 1903). Artist: Unknown. Image by The Print Collector via Getty Images.

Class was clearly important. One contemporary observer suggested that the British working class bought three-quarters of all beer and spirits, and a tenth of all wine sold in the 1880s; they accounted for between two-thirds and three-quarters of all drink spending (Dingle 1972: 612). We have some sense of the proportion of household budgets that was spent on drink—a peak of 14.5 percent in Germany in 1870–4, with British estimates ranging from a sixth to a half (Dingle 1972: 610; Roberts 1984: 45)—but this was not evenly distributed. In France between 1890 and 1910 better-paid workers spent more of their income on alcohol, and men spent more on alcohol than women (Prestwich 1988: 86–7). In fact the better- and the worst-off workers may have consumed more than those on average wages. In Paris in the 1880s and 1890s some workers responded to economic uncertainty by privileging drink over food; at the same time café customers tended to be skilled, well-paid workers (Haine 1996: 94, 65). In Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century, the best- and worst-paid workers and peasants drank more than moderate earners (Krasnov 2003: 15).

Consumption 49

The suggestion that better-paid workers drank more than others is supported by evidence from the United States, Britain, and Russia. Thorstein Veblen suggested that the free drinking of journeyman printers reflected the character of their employment. Highly skilled and well paid, printers were in demand everywhere, and well informed about their prospects; more mobile than other workers, they were constantly thrown into new friendships in new workplaces. All of this encouraged public drinking, especially “treating” or buying rounds, a form of conspicuous consumption that advertised the printer’s affluence (and therefore ability) as well as building social bonds (1915: 90). Thomas Wright claimed that English engineers (“the trade of the day”) had invented the custom of “Saint Monday,” missing work at the start of the week, with some having had “a drop too much at the suburban inn” the night before (1867: 114). We will consider Saint Monday (Reid 1976) in a moment, but it is possible that these workers used their extra income to offset the demands of the working week (Dingle 1972: 617). In industrial Wales employers complained that it was hard to find and keep skilled workers amid a general labor shortage; higher wages meant more drinking and drunkenness, but well-paid workers were harder to discipline (Lambert 1983: 36, 44). In Russia in the early 1930s skilled workers were rarely punished for drinking on the job or turning up drunk, even when this meant closing a factory. Like their Welsh peers they were too valuable to sack or discipline (Transchel 2006: 132–5). At the end of our period a classic study of a West Yorkshire mining community suggested that when higher earners paid for the drinks of others this was a form of “capital destruction” which narrowed the gap in income and status between different groups of men (Dennis et al. 1956). Medical and actuarial evidence suggested other links between employment and heavy drinking. In England and Wales inn or beershop keepers had the eighth worst mortality of all male professions, and their servants had the worst of all (General Register Office 1885: 24–5). Excessive drinking also played its part in the poor life expectancy of cabmen and commercial travelers (35–6, 65). At the turn of the century the six occupations with the highest rates of death from alcoholism were hotel servants, innkeepers, chimney sweeps, dock laborers, brewers, and costermongers (Smee 1901: 28). British and American life insurance companies worried about drinkers since their early deaths meant a loss for the firm. Their own mortality statistics confirmed the patterns noted above and firms began to price insurance accordingly; from the 1870s onwards many charged publicans extra, or refused to insure them at all (Kneale and French 2013, 2015). In France a similar group of occupations—hospitality workers, butchers—displayed significant alcohol-related mortality problems (Prestwich 1988: 84). There is much less evidence of this kind for middle-class and elite drinking, although insurance fraud cases often revealed hidden drinking in respectable circles. While gender is considered in more depth elsewhere in this volume, it is worth making a few points about women consumers of alcohol here. They made up between a quarter and a third of pub drinkers in England at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century (Gutzke 1984) and on certain nights of the week some rooms or pubs might be dominated by women (Ross 1983; Paul Jennings 2007; Gleiss 2009). Attitudes relaxed in some countries during the world wars, reflecting women’s wider participation in work and public life (Gutzke 1994; Langhamer 2003; Moss 2008; Gutzke 2013), but even between the wars women made up between 12.5 and 41.5 percent of British patrons (Langhamer 2003: 426). Before the era of six o’clock closing Australian pubs were not, in general, as masculine as US saloons (Blainey 2003).

50 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Figure 2.2  Drinkers in the public bar of an English public house, 1938. Photograph by Felix Man/ Picture Post/Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

Other kinds of evidence reveal women’s drinking. Records of arrests and convictions of women for drink-related offences suggest they took part in drinking in many places: Guatemala from the 1920s to 1944 (Carey 2014: 143), late nineteenth-century England and Wales (Rowntree and Sherwell 1899: 89), Ontario between 1881 and 1914, and Ottawa between 1893 and 1901 (Warsh 1993: 78). We have to be wary of these figures, of course, as they were shaped by ideas of appropriate feminine behavior (Gutzke 1984; Moss 2009; Beckingham 2010, 2012), but they do suggest that many ordinary women did drink. Similarly Catherine Gilbert Murdock provides a good deal of evidence for women’s drinking in the United States between 1870 and 1940 (1998) and Laura Phillips does the same for Russia before and after the revolution (2000). Religious belief, culture, and ethnicity also guided drink consumption. Christian temperance organizations encouraged abstinence, moderation, and alcohol control across the world. In Islamic countries traditions of elite drinking continued in private, although individual rulers varied in their attitudes and the drinking of non-Muslims was prohibited on occasion. In Iran during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1848–96), some members of the elite were enthusiastic private consumers, although most, particularly women and rural Iranians, did not drink (Matthee 2005). Increasing contact with Europeans seems to have coincided with the growing availability of alcohol, especially distilled drink, in Iran in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The consumption of alcohol by Muslims was also proscribed within the Ottoman Empire, but again elite groups indulged in the private consumption of wine, beer, and raki, especially after European drinks became symbols of modernity in the reign of Sultan Abdulmecid (1839–61); by the twentieth century all classes of the Empire

Consumption 51

were drinking alcohol, especially in the port cities and other cosmopolitan areas of the Empire (Georgeon 2002; Furhman 2014; Mathee 2014). Fonder suggests that British troops encouraged shifting consumption habits in Imperial Cairo from 1882 (2013). In Nigeria and North Africa Europeans observed some Muslim drinking in the first half of the twentieth century, especially of African drinks not proscribed by the Koran (Pan 1975: 25); similar arguments were employed to justify the use of raki in Turkey. In Africa both aggressive imperialists like Cecil Rhodes and more sympathetic temperance campaigners agreed that Africans had to be kept away from strong drink (Pan 1975). Sales of European spirits to Africans were banned throughout most of Africa from 1919, but the general principle also informed local legislation (Parry 1992). Of course the sale of alcohol to African Americans was strictly controlled in the southern states of the United States at the start of our period (Herd 1991), and sales to Native Americans were effectively prohibited from the start of the nineteenth century (Ishii 2008). In Canada questions of “race” continued to trouble the post-Prohibition beer parlour and Aboriginal people were not allowed to drink in public until 1951 (Campbell 2001; Heron 2003; Malleck 2012, and this volume); in Australia Aboriginal drinking was controlled from the 1830s (Brady 2019).

Drinking Occasions In many places established drinking customs persisted alongside newer expectations of everyday drinking. In Wales this meant drinking was associated with festivals, the end of periods of communal working, rites of passage like weddings or funerals, secular events like auctions and elections, and the meetings of friendly and literary societies, or of political groups like the Chartists (Lambert 1983). Despite pressure from Methodist reformers, these recreations clung on in the new industrial towns of south Wales. In pre-revolutionary Russia alcohol had a central role in village life, taking the form of “‘ceremonial’ binge drinking associated with church festivals, rites of passage, family celebrations, and any special occasions in the life of the rural community” (Transchel 2006: 15). There were twelve main church festivals, each of which might require three to five days of drinking, as well as local festivals. Weddings required enormous amounts of vodka; elections and work parties (pomochi) were also opportunities for drinking. In contrast, regular individual drinking was rare and considered anti-social, and drinking on non-ceremonial days only became possible with the arrival of taverns and a cash economy. In 1911 one observer distinguished between the two worlds of “Mr. Harvest” and “Mr. Capital”: sporadic peasant drinking and regular proletarian consumption (22). However, these worlds overlapped where households engaged in both farm and urban wage work, leading to a hybrid “third culture” of drinking; in a tavern in Bogorodsk in 1859 the men met there most days, while women would only join them for communal holiday drinking. There is also extensive evidence for the “near ubiquity of alcohol in rituals in ­nineteenth-century East African societies” (Willis 2002: 61). The rites of passage of Maasai men were associated with alcohol, while older men required alcohol for blessings. While alcohol was almost ubiquitous in Nyakyusa rituals, its use marked individual and domestic crises, household sickness or poor weather rather than moments of transition. In the Gold Coast palm wine played an important role in organizing work parties, marking rites of passage, and establishing the patronage of older men (Akyeampong 1996b).

52 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

In many industrializing societies the opportunity to drink was greatly extended by cash and new work rhythms. Alcohol consumption began to be understood as a “right” or custom rather than an occasional “treat.” In France drink was beginning to be thought of as “not simply a consolation, but part of an acceptable standard of living” by the 1890s (Prestwich 1988: 23). This attitude can also be detected in drink riots and “strikes” (or boycotts) in several countries. State control of alcohol made drink a political issue everywhere, but in these cases it was very clearly a question of custom. In Russia before emancipation, Western India in the 1880s, and the North German Bierkrieg of 1909, drinkers swore oaths of sobriety and boycotted drinksellers to demand lower prices and defend their standard of living (Roberts 1984; Transchel 2006; Colvard 2013). In France regular drinking was perhaps encouraged by the new habit of taking an aperitif before meals, made affordable because of the cheapness of spirits made with industrial alcohol (Prestwich 1988: 93). Across the Channel many of the rituals recorded by John Dunlop in 1839 may have developed in small workshops and artisan trades well before 1850, while others may have been much more recent; some were associated with rites of passage and others with labor or craft customs. Alcohol was also a central part of everyday life in Germany. Roberts’ description of a typical “drinking day” starts with spirits taken on the way to work; some workers would then drink through the day and most drank with the meals they took at work. Additional drinking might celebrate birthdays and holidays, specific craft traditions, or new workmates; the worker would then go home, often via taverns and bars (1984: 46–7). The drinking day could be long, although most of it involved small amounts. However, the appointment of a factory inspectorate from the 1870s, the availability of alternative beverages, and better conditions for workers encouraged many to stop or reduce on-the-job drinking, especially in the best-paid and most-unionized trades. In Chicago, the drinking day began with early morning “bracers” for men on their way to work; at lunchtime, taverns served diners and growler rushers (children bringing pails in to be filled with beer); in the afternoon women or children bought drink to take home; business would be brisk from the later afternoon (Duis 1983). Saloons also played an important role in “the daily cycle of life on the skids” for bums and flophouse dwellers, from the dawn “eye opener” to the free lunch (89). By the twentieth century the drinking day was much drier in many places; in Bolton, England, in the 1930s most pubs were virtually empty during the middle of the day, except at weekends (Mass-Observation 1943). Drinking rhythms were structured by payday, which offered short-lived prosperity. In Paris by 1870, however, there were more cases of public drunkenness on saint-lundi (“Holy Monday”) than Saturday, which was payday for most workers (Haine 1996). This pattern may have reflected greater police tolerance on Saturdays, but Monday night café visits were still very popular with workers. The pulquerías of Mexico City were busy on “Saint Monday,” but María Áurea Toxqui Garay suggests that this marked the end of the weekend, not the most drunken day of the week (2008). Similarly, in nineteenth-century Russia “Blue Monday” (absenteeism or “hair of the dog” drinking at work) was common in the mining and metal industries, and as a result mines might remain closed after the weekend (Transchel 2006). In England this structured working week seems to have predated industrialization, at least in towns and cities, and “Saint Monday” was well established before 1850 as “a fixed arrangement and not merely a by-product of weekend inebriation” (Harrison 1986: 167, 140).

Consumption 53

Figure 2.3  “Saint Monday in the Prater wine tavern,” 1818. Image courtesy of Wien Museum.

Mass-Observation’s study of Worktown (Bolton) drinking in the 1930s demonstrated that pubs were busiest on Saturday, the day after payday (1943). Patrons drank faster on Fridays and Saturdays, with the slowest drinking being recorded midweek. The last hour of the night and the last day of the week were the times for heaviest drinking. Similarly, the pub was the last place visited by Bolton workers leaving Blackpool at the end of their holidays. Many left drunk, laden with bottles for the journey so they could make the most of the last moments of their holiday (Cross 1990). Of course, drinking rhythms were also shaped by regulations and licensing. Perhaps the most obvious example from this period is the “six o’clock swill” of Australia and New Zealand, introduced as a result of temperance pressure and wartime patriotism in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania from 1915. Queensland and Western Australia allowed pubs to open until 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. respectively from 1916, and controls were relaxed in Tasmania in the 1920s and in New South Wales in the 1950s, but six o’clock closing remained in force in Victoria and South Australia until the 1960s and in New Zealand it lasted for half a century between 1917 and 1967 (Blainey 2003). With only an hour between the end of work and closing time, everything that got in the way of drinking was removed and Australian pubs became mere drinking environments. This had been the reformers’ intention, but consumption levels hardly changed, although drinkers “drank most of it between five and six o’clock in the evening and the rest from bottles they took home” (Phillips 1980: 251).

54 Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Elsewhere drink became more, not less, central to the workplace. The South African “tot system,” by which African agricultural workers received part of their pay in wine, dated from the eighteenth century. In the Western Cape at the end of the nineteenth century, workers received up to two quarts each weekday, or a bottle a day at the weekend; “work time came to be marked by the intervals between the pouring of the tot” (Scully 1992: 59) and drinking at work symbolized domination and repression. Finally, it is worth remembering that the rhythms of local drinking cultures were affected by other temporalities beyond those of work. In late nineteenth-century Britain football drew crowds away from pubs on Saturday afternoons, making it a rival in terms of the weekly rhythms of masculine working-class life (Collins and Vamplew 2002: 15). In many places shifts in working-class spending meant that drinking customs had to co-exist with rival claims to the time of workers and their families.

Drinking Places and Practices The consumption of alcohol is often closely related to the places in which it is consumed; in this way public and private drinking are practices as much as locations. Ray Oldenburg’s suggestion that drinking locations represent one kind of “third place” between work and home (1989) echoes Perry Duis’ description of saloons as “semi-public city spaces” between the public and the private (1983: 3). For Oldenburg the German-American lager beer garden offers “the model, par excellence, of the third place” in our period (1989: 103). It was more inclusive than the saloon, with family-friendly amenities, although it could not compete with the saloon, which was cheaper to run and more profitable. Still, a late nineteenth-century American sociologist recognized that the saloon “unites the many ones into a common whole which we call society … and intemperance is but its accident” (Moore 1897: 4) and historians have tended to agree that drinking places could be collective social spaces. In Tsarist Russia “the tavern took on some of the characteristics of the commune” (Transchel 2006: 28), the chapel and the pub were the “twin foci of most ­nineteenth-century Welsh communities” (Lambert 1983: 13), and in Germany “the tavern was … the locus of working-class social life” (Roberts 1984: 117). Surveying Bolton’s pubs in the 1930s, Mass-Observation concluded that the pub was stronger than rival collective institutions like churches, political parties, and the cinema (1943). Drinking places could be “great good places,” then, though not everywhere; in the cities of the Ottoman Empire, coffeehouses were symbols of the public sphere, not the taverns operated by non-Muslims (Matthee 2014). While these sentiments obviously reflected genuine feelings of commensality and belonging, this was not universal; women were only likely to join male regulars at the Russian tavern on weekends and feast days, for example (Transchel 2006). In fact drinking places made the stratification of societies highly visible, and this was sometimes seen to be a positive thing. What Willis calls “mixed drinking”—bringing together drinkers of different genders, age groups, classes, and ethnicities together—was a cause for concern beyond East Africa (2002: 10). In Victorian Britain dram and beershops were associated with working-class drinkers (Paul Jennings 2007); and in France “the traditional assommoir, run by husband and wife, might count a few tables by the fire” while “elegant boulevards boasted of cafés that could serve several hundred people” (Prestwich

Consumption 55

1988: 80). There were around 30,000 cafés in Belle Époque Paris, providing plenty of variety for every occupation, taste, and political affiliation (Haine 1996: 4). We should also remember that these were commercial as well as communal sites (Powers 1998). The bar or counter, common to many drinking places around the world, was also found in other nineteenth-century retail spaces; its adoption may have been a pragmatic response to the problem of serving crowds of customers quickly (Gorham and Dunnett 1950; Girouard 1975). Premises with a bar but little or no seating characterized a “drink and go” culture of “perpendicular drinking,” but this might reflect a mobile urban culture where drinkers circulated quickly between premises, or deliberate attempts to discourage lingering while improving surveillance of a single open space (Kneale 1999). British pubs of this period have received a good deal of attention (Harrison 1973; Girouard 1975; Kenna and Mooney 1983). The best recent work is that of Paul Jennings (1995, 2007), supplemented by studies associated with English Heritage, now Historic England (Brandwood et al. 2004; Fisher and Preston 2015), the work of Alistair Mutch (2003, 2004, 2006, 2008), David Beckingham’s research on Liverpool and Glasgow (2017a, 2017b, 2017c), and studies of “improved houses” (Greenaway 1998; Gutzke 2005; Fisher and Preston 2019). British drinking places catered to many different types of drinkers. This can be seen in the differences between the pub and the beerhouse, introduced before this period in an attempt to liberalize drinking. In Wales the beerhouse was more like a cottage than a pub, and across England and Wales licensing authorities sought to either improve or close beerhouses (Lambert 1983; Paul Jennings 2007). Mutch notes that where Manchester was dominated by beerhouses, Liverpool’s pubs were larger and grander, due to the economic geography of the two cities, the attitudes of their magistrates, and the management of Liverpool’s pubs (2003). These differences could also be found within drinking places. Open plan rooms, associated with the “gin palaces” of early nineteenth-century London, became less popular by 1850, as pubs divided into smaller compartments, snugs, and more comfortable lounges and saloons (Gorham and Dunnett 1950; Girouard 1975). In cities this was encouraged by “the ineradicable class-consciousness of the English,” as “customers had to be segregated from each other” (Gorham and Dunnett 1950: 26). In Hackney in the 1890s G. H. Duckworth, one of Charles Booth’s social investigators, noted that pub spaces reflected The separation of the classes. It is the object of the publican to separate his customers as far as possible into their social grades. That is why there are so many divisions … different articles are sold at the saloon bar than are at the public bar & not the same thing at a higher price. (1897: 199)

For much of the twentieth century many British pubs offered “public” and “lounge” bars, respectively more working-class and masculine, and middle-class and feminine. While the lack of table service in many British pubs still puzzles international visitors, there is evidence for it, at least in lounges, in pubs in London, the Midlands, and northern England until the second half of the twentieth century (Gorham 1949; Brandwood et al. 2004). After 1900 temperance pressure encouraged a general reduction in the numbers of licenses, which tended to improve the quality of the surviving stock of British pubs. Many breweries played an active part in this process (Gutzke 2005). “Improved” pubs were betterrun, more hygienic, and easier to supervise, designed to appeal to women as well as to

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Figure 2.4  Exterior of the Horseshoe & Wheatsheaf public house, Southwark, London, 1898. The chimney bears an ornate datestone of 1897, below which is a plaque carrying the name of the pub. Two large lanterns decorate the facade. The brewery name, Whitbread and Co, is displayed prominently in a shaped gable. Photograph by English Heritage/Heritage Images via Getty Images.

men. Seating was encouraged, and gardens, food, and entertainment provided alternative attractions to drink (Fisher and Preston 2018, 2019), although these features could also be found in the altogether livelier “roadhouse” (Law 2009; Gutzke and Law 2017). In Britain improvement culminated in the premises operated by the Central Control Board during the First World War, which will be considered in a moment. Irish pubs resembled British ones, although gin palaces were rare outside Belfast and Dublin. However, the absence of “ties,” the relationships by which brewers owned or managed pubs in return for the sale of their beer, meant that Irish pubs remained far more independent and local in character; many were converted homes or shops (Malcolm 1998). In France the liberalization of licensing from 1880 led to a great increase in the number of debíts de boissons (drinksellers, for consumption on and off the premises). “Urban, ­working-class, and dominated by the still” (Prestwich 1988: 17), they sold brandy, absinthe, and other spirits made with industrial alcohol. These drinks, much cheaper than wine, became a staple of working-class French drinking (Prestwich 1988). Haine’s excellent study of the Parisian café provides a detailed appraisal of its importance for the city’s working class (1996). A similar picture prevailed in Germany, where liberal licensing laws encouraged taverns to open and

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Figure 2.5  “Les débits de boissons au Champ-de-Mars,” Paris, 1879. From Simon de Vandière, Exposition universelle de 1878 illustrée (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1879). Image courtesy of Brown University Library.

forced them to become more attractive in competition with one another. At the same time the growth of an associational world of clubs, societies, and family entertainments within taverns and beer gardens “disciplined drinking behaviour by subordinating it to other goals and purposes” (Roberts 1984: 117). Russian taverns, state-owned as part of the Tsarist vodka monopoly, did not prosper until the spread of a cash economy in the nineteenth century, when they rapidly became important, and increasingly masculine, social spaces (Transchel 2006). There are rich histories of African drinking places during this century, largely because colonial states sought to suppress or to profit from them, and because developing cash economies dissolved restrictions on who could drink which drinks, making these sites of conflict and anxiety. In British East Africa, the Uganda Liquor Ordinance of 1917 controlled production, sale, and consumption of all alcohol, “native” or otherwise, while in the Buganda kingdom ebirabo (clubs for the sale of local drinks) were banned (Willis 2002). This was reversed in the 1930s and ebirabo were encouraged as regulated outlets, as a source of income for local “native” authorities. In Kenya privately owned beerhalls were encouraged after Mombasa’s prospered; in 1940 white Kenyan employers were allowed to establish beerhalls as long as profits were for the benefit of Africans (138). These specialized commercial urban sites quickly became important. “In 1940 most of the alcohol consumed

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by Africans in East Africa was drunk at or near people’s homes, and much of it was still being drunk without payment,” but “by the late 1950s, much—probably most—drinking across the region took place in urban beerhalls or rural clubs” (141). This was driven by a shift from state monopolies to private clubs, benefiting both colonial states and local entrepreneurs. In Gold Coast in the late 1920s, restrictive liquor laws—higher import duties, half as many licenses, shorter opening hours, and above all a crackdown on akpeteshie or local gin—had serious consequences for “a vibrant popular culture … of drinking bars, popular music (‘highlife’) and comic opera (concert), that was emerging in urban Gold Coast” (Akyeampong 1996a: 221–2). These bars were an integral part of an urbanizing, developing society, important for both the elite and the working class, and remained important after independence. In Southern Africa drinking places were closely bound up with the labor migration, urbanization, and development that followed the mining boom of the 1870s and 1880s. Employers sought to maximize efficiency by licensing or prohibiting sources of alcohol, by establishing closed compounds (some “dry,” others provided with their own company beerhalls), or by adopting the “tot” system (Van Onselen 1976). “Employers and local authorities in towns and cities combined not to destroy the liquor trade but to seize control of it, shape it to their needs, and profit from it” (Ambler and Crush 1992: 18). By the start of the early twentieth century, the domestic production and consumption of “native” drinks were limited to the countryside, and in towns only state-licensed or state-owned outlets could sell them. We have excellent studies of drinking places in the United States, Canada, and Central America for this period. The US saloon adapted to different political, social, and economic contexts. Both Boston and Chicago adopted a policy of “high license”—making licenses expensive in order to reduce their number and drive out marginal proprietors—but this had different outcomes (Duis 1983). In Boston nearly three-quarters of all licenses were for “restaurants” by 1895, although many offered limited food; these cheap “barroom-restaurants” drove out grocery stores, especially in tenement areas, and this brought about a subtle but significant “transition from private to public drinking, from grocery store to common victualler” (30). Boston sought to limit the number of saloons, which meant that there was no incentive for their owners to improve their quality. Chicago adopted a more laissez-faire approach that encouraged competition for patrons; attractions like billiard tables flourished, but not in Boston, and the provision of lavish free lunches sometimes drove saloons into bankruptcy. The World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair) of 1893 prompted a “beer war” as 700 new saloons opened to meet the anticipated demand. Canadian cities were well stocked with legal and illegal taverns by 1850 (Cafferky 2003b). “Joe Beef’s,” an infamous late nineteenth-century working-class tavern on Montreal’s waterfront, provided patrons with information, entertainment, public debates on topical matters, accommodation for up to 200 men, and emergency funds to help support regulars in trouble; the proprietor also actively campaigned for better medical and employment prospects for the city’s working class (DeLottinville 1981–2). However, liquor control would transform Canadian drinking places after the First World War, as we will see in a moment. Pulque, a fermented drink made from the sap of the maguey plant, was popular in Mexico long before European contact. Studies of the pulquerías of Mexico City note that the liberal administrations of the second half of the nineteenth-century prohibited new

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businesses within middle-class areas, imposed strict regulations on pulquerías, and forced ­improvements on them (Toxqui Garay 2008; Toner 2011, 2015a). The microgeographies of these places attracted a good deal of discussion and concern, as they did in Britain, and for part of this period the authorities were keen to discourage loitering by removing seats and tables and placing the bar counter just inside the doors to the street. Regulations forbade customers staying any longer than was necessary to finish their drinks and specified a minimum distance between pulquerias (Toxqui Garay 2008). Comparing these premises with Mexico City’s other drinking places—vinaterías, largely selling spirits, and cafés, which were

Figure 2.6  “Mexico: Scenes before a Pulqueria in the City of Mexico,” c. 1900. Image by Bettman via Getty Images.

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elite spaces—Deborah Toner concludes that “popular and elite drinking places operated as microcosms of the contests over Mexico City’s social space in the nineteenth century” (2011: 27). The regulation of drinking places was clearly significant in shaping drinking cultures (Valverde 2003b). From 1865 “Gothenburg” or “disinterested management” ideas spread from Scandinavia to Britain, to Britain’s African colonies, and—after Prohibition—to North America, arguing that commercial motivations encouraged drinking. The first British outlets at the turn of the century were run for the benefit of investors (Gutzke 2003), inspiring the Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic) to borrow their ideas during the First World War. The Board purchased, improved, and ran local pubs and built new ones, first near the Royal Small Arms Factory in North London, and then at Cromarty Firth, Carlisle, and Gretna Green (Nicholls 2009; Duncan 2013; White 2014). This brief wartime experiment was to prove influential in terms of “improved” pub design. A similar system had already been implemented in Southern Africa in 1909 when Durban’s municipal government instituted a local monopoly on making and selling beer to fund municipal improvement, encouraging similar schemes in Southern Rhodesia and Johannesburg (La Hausse 1992; Parry 1992; Rogerson 1992) and municipal beerhalls in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, and elsewhere (Willis 2002, 2003a). South African beerhalls were deliberately “bleak functional buildings with little character and no charm” (Ambler and Crush 1992: 25) and Johannesburg’s beerhalls were not popular with drinkers (Rogerson 1992). In the 1930s, “in the clubs of Nairobi and Mombasa, with their brick and wire-mesh walls, turnstiles, and ‘stalwart attendants,’ the cheerless colonial vision of urban drinking as a physiological function came closest to realization” (Willis 2002: 129). In their determination to provide the bare minimum beyond access to alcohol, African beerhalls resembled the “pure drinking environments” of Britain, although the latter were shaped only by lightly regulated market forces. In Canada after Prohibition, many provinces experimented with closely regulated privately owned public “beer parlours,” designed to minimize the corrupting effect of alcohol and improve the conduct of their patrons (Malleck 2012; this volume). These resembled less appealing versions of the improved or state-controlled British pub. Alcohol could of course be found in many other leisure places in this period. Some, like British singing or dancing saloons, or twentieth-century roadhouses (Law 2009), grew out of pubs. Others, like music halls or members’ clubs—both working class and aristocratic— were effectively parallel institutions. While clubs, political organizations, and societies had met in drinking places around the world for centuries, not everyone wanted to drink. In Britain the Club and Institute Union was initially set up to support “dry” clubs, although from 1865 it accepted that clubs could opt to sell beer to members (Tremlett 1987; Cherrington 2012). Club numbers grew slowly at first, picked up after 1900, and boomed after 1945. From 1872 they were exempt from licensing but after 1902 had to register with licensing authorities. Drink was cheap because clubs did not need to make a profit, but the attraction of most clubs seems to have been the entertainment and sociability they offered, rather than low prices. Women could only attend as guests until full membership was extended to them in 2007. Gentlemen’s clubs were also sites for masculine homosociality, but drink played a much more important role than it did in working men’s clubs. However, excessive intoxication was frowned upon as “a serious breach of gentlemanly status,” and members were forced to

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resign if matters got out of hand (Milne-Smith 2011: 79). Similarly homely yet masculine, the clubs of British East Africa were often much less well-behaved, and many seem to have made the most of the looser regulations that surrounded them (Willis 2002). Of course other kinds of retail site could be licensed for consumption of alcohol on the premises. The liberal licensing of Second Empire Paris encouraged shops of many kinds to offer drink to their customers, particularly women (Prestwich 1988). In Ireland the spirit grocer’s Licence (1791–1910) allowed grocers to sell a limited amount of spirits for consumption off the premises; critics claimed it was widely abused, particularly by women, who stayed to drink in the shops (Kearns 1996). British women do seem to have been shop drinkers but as yet there is little published research on this topic. As home brewing became increasingly rare in many places, the sale of alcoholic drinks for consumption off the premises connected drinking places and homes. In Chicago “rushing the growler” made the saloon an extension of the home (Duis 1983). In Britain a license for “off” sales represented a major source of income for small grocers; in Leicester they defended their customers against teetotal criticism, arguing that it was better that they came to them than to the pubs and in doing so shopkeepers “assumed the role of stewards of working-class respectability” (Hosgood 1989: 453). Of course an unknown amount of alcohol was drunk “nowhere in particular,” that is, not in homes, workplaces, or specialized drinking places. In rapidly urbanizing societies the provision of drinking places fell behind population growth even where alcohol regulation was liberal. In Russia a brief ban on new establishments exacerbated this problem in the 1890s; street drinking increased near off-sale premises and canny entrepreneurs set up stands hiring out drinking glasses (Transchel 2006). The same reforms sought to separate drink from food by prohibiting the sale of food in drink stores, but were confounded by drinkers smuggling vodka into traktirs (cheap eating places) (Herlihy 2002). Later prohibitions on public drinking in the USSR were ignored by workers who drank in parks, dining halls, ­cooperatives, and workers’ clubs (Transchel 2006). Of course there were many illicit drinking places too. In Boston in 1884 there were perhaps 1,300 unlicensed and 2,808 licensed places; in Chicago these figures were around 1,500 and 3,500 respectively (Duis 1983: 62–3). It seems likely that “high license” fostered these illicit “Blind Pigs,” as did lax policing. Chicago’s lakefront meant it was possible to operate bumboats—floating saloons—outside the territorial limit, and drinkers were also served by wagons selling bottles, some illegally. In Wales unlicensed premises were known as “jerries” (Lambert 1983). In many other places—Ireland, Scotland, the United States, and Africa (West, Southern, and East)—unlicensed drink shops were more likely to be called “shebeens,” a word borrowed from the Irish. In Africa it was these shebeens that prompted prohibitions on African production and sale of drink, and ultimately state monopolies and municipal beerhalls.

Conclusions We have considered evidence for how much alcohol was consumed, its drinkers, the occasions on which they drank, and the places where they drank it between 1850 and 1950. While there may be some evidence for a shift away from “traditional” drinking, it does appear that rhythms and practices that we associate with industrialization were in existence long

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before this period, and that elements of past custom survived throughout this century. The picture is complicated even further by imperialism and by the global exchange of drinks and drinking practices it fostered. It is possible that the spread of cash economies made it possible to make and drink alcohol more freely, and distilled spirits did become much cheaper. However despite this, it seems that average consumption fell in many countries in the twentieth century, due to a mix of changing habits and government controls. It does also seem to be true that alcohol was chased out of workplaces, or at least urban ones, meaning that specialized drinking places became more important. Given that past experiences of drinking are often drawn upon in discussions of contemporary alcohol policy, it is important that we recognize that consumption in this period was not, on the whole, shaped by powerful logics, and that countries took rather different paths—we might compare France and the Scandinavian nations, for example. A better sense of the reasons behind these outcomes would help us make better sense of contemporary debates about alcohol consumption.

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3

REGULATION AND PROHIBITION DAN MALLECK

Introduction In many countries, alcohol consumption presented a dilemma that required strategies for its regulation. The very theme of “industry and empire” highlights the challenges of managing various communities of people, most notably the working classes clustered into rapidly growing cities to fuel the industrial machine and aboriginal peoples subjected by colonizing and conquering populations. This chapter considers the examples of regulation and prohibition in several countries, the impact of alcohol upon people in colonized regions, and the significant effects that war, most especially the First World War, had on alcohol policy. The efforts of governments to license alcohol have several main features. In the middle of the nineteenth century, many governments were wrestling with the issue of how to regulate a commercial product and not violate laissez-faire principles. These worries often evaporated, however, under the pressure of temperance advocates, or concerns about the effect of drink on the nation voiced by government itself. Yet liquor licensing offered a paradox. To impose high license fees in an effort to promote moderate drinking also enriched governments, so the subsequent decline in drinking could reduce revenues. This tension between revenue and moderationism was a persistent feature in many national stories. Confounding the prohibitionist efforts was the liquor industry. Its power varied in different countries, and often it was much less organized than temperance, at least before the end of the nineteenth century. These three factors are the main influences over the regulation of liquor in this period, resulting in a range of strategies to tax and control the consumption of beverage alcohol, while often nurturing domestic drinks industries. One of the most significant results was the advent of the idea of state-centered “disinterested management,” often related to the system of government organization of the manufacture and distribution of alcohol pioneered in Gothenburg, Sweden, and adopted and adapted in various countries around the world.

Licensing before the First World War England In England, liquor licensing was debated within the context of laissez-faire economics that expected government to keep regulation to a minimum and mostly function to make capital accumulation easier. The main purpose of licensing legislation to mid-century was to regulate the trade in the interest of the “‘public good,’ … by preventing disorder, curbing adulteration and by raising taxation.” From the 1820s to the 1870s legislation was focused

upon curbing local magistrates’ power and endorsing laissez-faire principles (Greenaway 2003: 13–17). This form of legislation has been called “free licensing,” an approach embedded, for example, in the 1830 Beer Act which was “a victory of free trade capitalism over the established power of local economic and political elites” (Nicholls 2009: 80). The legislation swept away magistrates’ oversight and expectation that licenses would be granted only to individuals of “good” character, instead requiring anyone who wished to sell beer to pay a small license fee for the privilege. Clearly favoring producers and vendors, this legislation galvanized the anti-spirits movement into “a radical and well organized teetotal temperance campaign” (Nicholls 2009: 90). Free licensing faced persistent attacks as critics noted that the free market did not seem to be regulating the trade as it should, temperance became more popular, and drink became a partisan issue. Gladstone’s 1864 “Permissive Prohibition Bill” introduced the idea of the local veto, where localities could vote to ban alcohol sales. The Wine and Beerhouse Act (1869) was intended to deal with the dramatic increase in drink outlets that resulted from the permissive Beer Act a generation earlier (Nicholls 2009: 122). Intense debates around the 1872 Licensing Act had several results. First, the resulting legislation was significantly less excessive than initially intended. Second, a strong advocate for the drinks industry, the Licensed Victuallers Defence League, emerged to counter the strong and vocal temperance movement. Third, the debates fleshed out emerging partisan delineations, with Liberals supported by Drys and Conservatives supported by Wets. Gladstone even attributed his electoral failure in 1874 to the increasingly toxic issue of drink (Greenaway 2003: 33–5). James Nicholls has identified several key principles that underpinned debates on drink at this time. Could a state retain free trade principles while simultaneously placing limits on a specific trade; should local populations have control over the trade in alcohol; and was it best to remove the profit motive from the liquor trade, instituting “disinterested management” such as represented by the Gothenburg system? These principles were tested in the next half century. A 1891 Queen’s Bench decision known as Sharp v Wakefield set the precedent that licensing justices had the right to refuse any license, not only new license applications (Nicholls 2009: 131–2. See also Greenaway 2003: 54). In 1897 a Royal Commission on Licensing decided that the government needed to reduce the number of licenses, but it could not agree upon how to do this. A key issue of division was how to compensate licensees whose businesses were closed, as per Sharp v Wakefield. As a result, a Conservative Licensing Act of 1904 reduced the power of local magistrates by prescribing financial compensation for anyone who was denied a license renewal (Gutzke 1989: 155–6; Greenaway 2003: 79; Nicholls 2009: 144, 146). After Asquith’s win in 1906, his Liberal Party’s 1908 Licensing Bill was intended to radically alter the licensing landscape. Among other things, the bill would reduce licenses by a third, alter compensation provisions from the 1904 Act, centralize the compensation process, make all new licenses subject to a local option vote, and prohibit women from working in pubs. Opponents argued that the bill was a step toward socialism, a harbinger of government control of the drinks industry, while the provision about women saw the drinks trade frame the bill as an attack on barmaids (Greenaway 2003: 81–3; Nicholls 2009: 150–1). Although the bill passed easily through the House of Commons, it was rejected by the Conservative-dominated House of Lords. Apart from passing a local veto bill for Scotland in

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1913, no other significant licensing legislation came into place before the beginning of the First World War. Liquor licensing remained a hot, partisan, and divisive issue.

France French legislation was focused upon revenue generation rather than imposing moderation until at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Facing a strong and entrenched liquor industry, albeit divided between the liquor producers of the north and the wine producers of the south, and an influential class of retailers, French politicians generally shied away from any actual legislative change. Except for passing a 1873 law against drunkenness after the Franco-Prussian War, legislation that was more about public disorder than drink, and forbidding the serving of alcohol to minors, legislation relating to liquor, when it was passed, was generally just about raising revenues. Legislative changes in 1880 removed many barriers to the retail sale of liquor. To own a débit de boisson—essentially any outlet that sold liquor by the glass or to takeaway—one had merely to pay the fees and observe the rules. Debits were nearly ubiquitous. Nearly any type of shop could hold a license, from cafes, bistros, and cabarets to fruit markets, grocers, and dairies. By the end of the nineteenth century the system experienced extraordinary expansion. Débitants were also politically powerful (Prestwich 1988: 16). The Regime des boissons system of licensing retail sales generated substantial revenue while “leaving considerable freedom to producers and distributors” (Prestwich 1988: 109).

Figure 3.1  Inside the French café “L’Assommoir,” c. 1900, France. Image by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

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Producers paid a variety of taxes and observed rules against fraud, and debitants had to pay license fees and comply with extensive regulations on the operation of the business. But in all other aspects, drinks vendors and producers were free to operate as they wished. Things changed early in the twentieth century, but only in moderate ways. In 1900, wine, beer, cider, and other drinks of moderate strength were labeled “hygienic drinks” and producers paid only one tax. To offset losses in revenues, taxes were raised on distilled beverages, and license fees were increased. The northern distillers fought for years to resist these changes, and had some success. Some politicians advocated a state takeover of the industry, but there was little movement until the First World War. The main temperance organization, the Ligue nationale contre l’alcoolisme [National League Against Alcoholism] initiated a campaign in 1903 with an aim to increase legislative action against liquor. Although advocating a broad range of issues, from 1903 the ligue sought mostly to limit the number of debits and to prohibit absinthe. Part of the campaign was aimed at supporting an 1899 bill to reduce the number of debits which wound its way through parliament for over a decade before being defeated in 1912. The absinthe issue was only moderately more successful. Absinthe, a strong spirit that was infused with a range of plant essences, had been framed as a problematic substance, as much a hallucinogenic drug as a beverage. With associations with bohemian debauchery, along with medical concerns over the physiological effect of the infusions, absinthe had become a problematic drink seen as debilitating to the French state. The movement against absinthe was strengthened when Belgium and Switzerland both banned it in 1906. Yet a 1907 push to ban absinthe failed in favor of adding another surtax. It was not until the beginning of the First World War that absinthe was banned. It was one of the few forms of alcohol prohibition that lasted for decades, although distillers managed to create similar products “in slightly less toxic but no less appealing form.” As Prestwich notes, the absinthe ban, then was “a hollow victory” (1988: 128–9, 134, 140).

Canada In the colonies of Canada, which were governed by a combination of British common law (and in French parts of Canada, some holdovers of French common law) and local legislation, liquor licensing reveals tension between laissez-faire ideals and the need for tight control over an increasingly problematized substance. Evangelical temperance advocates pushed for a government solution to what others might see as a personal moral issue whereas both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church tended not to espouse legislated solutions (Heron 2003: 155–6). By 1864, the United Provinces of Canada (which became Ontario and Quebec) passed the Dunkin Act, “local option” legislation permitting individual municipalities to hold referenda on the interest in having a dry community. This legislation remained intact after Confederation in 1867 created the Dominion of Canada. According to the British North America Act (1867), the Canadian constitution until the 1980s, liquor licensing was a provincial matter, although the federal government attempted at times to intervene. Consider the case of Ontario. In the 1870s, the government of Oliver Mowat—a powerful Liberal premier who was in office for nearly a quarter century—passed increasingly stringent licensing legislation which centralized control. Some saw this as a

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Figure 3.2  Lithograph marking the time and date of the prohibition of absinthe in Switzerland. An evil man, representing medicine and religion, gloats over the death of the freedom of the individual in Switzerland to consume absinthe, represented as a green woman stabbed by a cross. Colour lithograph after A.-H. Gantner, 1910. Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.

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result of his Liberal politics while critics argued that he was pandering to the drink industry and seeking more government revenue (Romney 2003). The Licensing Act of 1876 (called the Crooks Act after the legislator who proposed it) placed limits on the number of licenses for both taverns and shops and created a provincially appointed Board of License Commissioners (BLCs) for each municipality. Over the next several decades, the Ontario legislation broadened the complexity of licensing, while similarly limiting access to alcoholic beverages. In 1915, the municipal BLCs were replaced by a central provincial board (Malleck 2014). Federal-provincial jurisdictional disputes abounded. In 1878, the Dominion government passed the Canada Temperance Act broadening the local option legislation of the Dunkin Act. Although provinces cried constitutional foul, both the Supreme Court and the Privy Council ruled that the CTA fell within federal jurisdiction. However, a subsequent federal Dominion Licensing Act was declared unconstitutional. So provincial rights to license liquor had to function in tandem with dominion rights to restrict it (Malleck 2015a). In other provinces, licensing acts similar to the Crooks Act became law in British Columbia (1878), Nova Scotia (1886), New Brunswick (1887), and Manitoba (1889) (Heron 2003: 158–9). This is not to say they simply followed Ontario’s lead. Indeed, in such a diverse country liquor licenses operated in many forms. In the province of Quebec, for example, with a Roman Catholic and French-speaking majority, government control of liquor was less popular than elsewhere and prohibition was a non-starter. Conversely, in the Maritime Provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island—the combination of evangelicalism and progressive politics meant that the idea of prohibition was much stronger. The first province in the country to institute prohibition, PEI, went dry in 1906 (Heron 2003: 176). By the beginning of the First World War, dry sentiment was strong, although it was hardly an uncontested battle. Many communities which had voted themselves dry under local option returned to a wet status after a few years. Nevertheless, alcohol was increasingly framed as a problematic substance. The national Patent or Proprietary Medicines Act in 1908 emerged partly from the concern about prefabricated remedies containing high proportions of alcohol (Malleck 2015b). The law required manufacturers of proprietary medicine to indicate on their labels whether their product contained specific problematic substances, including alcohol. Provincial legislatures expanded restrictions on the availability of alcohol. But it was the First World War that gave increased force to the argument that prohibition was necessary for the future of the nation, and prohibitionists would see the victories for which they had long prayed.

United States In the United States, liquor legislation was similarly under the authority of individual state governments, although for much of the early years of licensing regulation, states often devolved authority and responsibility to individual communities. Reformers had much success in the first part of the century obtaining “special legislation” empowering local governments to create more stringent liquor regulations than occurred at the state level. By the middle of the nineteenth century, decades of locally focused legislation had created confusion and some chaos in liquor licensing and regulation (Szymanski 2003: 112).

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Figure 3.3  Neal Dow (1804–97), the Mayor of Portland, Maine, a staunch Prohibitionist, c. 1851. Engraved by J. C. Buttre. Image by Kean Collection via Getty Images.

Temperance campaigns were populist and influential in the United States, and saw a range of legislative innovations throughout the nineteenth century. Popular approaches included “high license” campaigns, demanding license fees that were so high that only the more “respectable” could afford them, and “no license” campaigns, where the state would refuse to grant any liquor licenses (Blocker 1989: 53–4; Pegram 1998: 34–8). Complete prohibition also became a viable option relatively early compared to other countries. In 1851 Maine was the first state to pass a prohibition law. Championed by Neal Dow, mayor of Portland, the law outlawed the sale of all alcoholic beverages except for medical, mechanical, or manufacturing purposes. Twelve other states quickly followed suit, with several other states passing watered down versions. By the end of the decade, however, all had either rescinded their laws or left them ignored or unenforced. The supreme courts in Massachusetts and New York deemed their Maine Laws to be unconstitutional and four other states’ courts weakened the provisions (Blocker 1989; Pegram 1998: 40–1).

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Temperance reformers sought to influence not only legislation, but also state constitutions. For example, in 1851 Ohio passed a no-license constitutional amendment that forbade the state from granting licenses at all (Blocker 1989: 54). Yet many politicians argued that embedding prohibition amendments in a state constitution could restrict the ability of state legislatures to create licensing laws. Still, many state constitutions by the last part of the century contained specific provisions limiting the ability of lawmakers to legislate a range of booze-related issues (Szymanski 2003: 96–7). The Civil War interrupted the zeal of temperance, which had already been set back by the failures of the Maine Laws. Post-war reconstruction included taxes on liquor, thereby undermining the no-license idea that states should not be involved in legitimizing the liquor industry through licensure. Some temperance reformers also complained that the war had reinforced—or reignited—the place of liquor in a male-centered culture. Moreover, the liquor industry became more organized, reacting as it did against various liquor taxes. As a result, efforts to see new legislation enacted had more active resistance from the industry. Nevertheless, some changes were made. Some states began to enforce their dormant prohibition laws (enforced by veterans of the Union army), and others passed restrictions such as bans on Sunday sales. In the 1870s, with liquor legislation becoming an increasingly politically touchy subject, some state politicians returned licensing power to local jurisdictions. Illinois and Wisconsin, for example, allowed municipal officials the right to license liquor sales. Pennsylvania passed local option legislation. Kansas required all license applications to be accompanied by a petition endorsing the application (Pegram 1998: 45–8; 50). In South Carolina, a unique experiment with state control emerged at the end of the century in the creation of a dispensary system. Modelled upon the principles of disinterested management, the South Carolina Dispensary was the innovation of Benjamin Tillman, a southern reformer who was governor from 1890 to 1894 and US senator from 1894 to 1918. The dispensary system gave the state complete monopoly over the sale and distribution of alcohol within the state. It existed for a relatively short time, from 1894 to 1907, but some have seen it as influential in post-prohibition liquor control regimes in both Canada and the United States (Welborn 2013; Powell 2015). By the last quarter of the century, the focus on state efforts was joined by an increased emphasis upon the need for national prohibition. This was the approach of the aptly named Prohibition Party, which formed in the 1880s but fractured in the 1890s. Its decline had several facets: prohibitionists were reluctant to pull support from their preferred major party (usually the Republicans), disagreement on how prohibition should be enacted, and conservative members’ distaste for the party’s endorsement of radical ideas like female suffrage (Blocker 1989: 99–101). The fate of the Prohibition Party informed the founders of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) which was organized in 1895. The ASL took a narrow approach, attacking the liquor traffic specifically at the site of the saloon but avoiding more “radical” policies. The ASL accompanied such organizations as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in pushing for various forms of prohibitory legislation, but its biggest success was in the drive toward national prohibition. The prohibitionist push accelerated around 1912 with numerous victories in state legislatures, which, Jack Blocker observes, resulted in much of the south being “rendered legally dry” (1989: 111). In 1913, Congress passed the Webb-Kenyon Act, which prohibited the shipment of liquor into states where such commerce violated that state’s

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laws. Soon after the United States entered the First World War, a new prohibition-minded Congress passed a war-related food conservation bill that included provisions forbidding the use of grain for distillation (Blocker 1989: 102; 111–13). Prohibition soon followed.

Russia The situation in Russia was different for many reasons. First of all, the common drink of Russians was vodka, a distilled spirit that was intertwined with Russian identity, rather than milder beverages popular elsewhere. Second, the trade in vodka had been controlled by— and had enriched—the government for centuries. Ivan the Terrible established state-run taverns (kabaks) and outlawed private vendors. Kabak revenues filled his coffers. Catherine the Great instituted a system known as vodka tax farming, in which individuals bid for the right to administer the liquor system in a set area. This system increased revenues and tied the sale of vodka to an elaborate social system supporting the established aristocracy by providing a system of revenue for the government, income for individuals, and dependency from licensees (Herlihy 2002: 5–6; Schrad 2014: 80–1; 94). The alcohol revenue system came under scrutiny during a period of intense political reform in the nineteenth century. Alexander II abolished tax farming because of the wide proliferation of taverns and vendors it had created. He shifted the system to one of direct taxation of distillers and vendors, but no real change in the extent of the liquor business was realized. The number of taverns and liquor stores increased, and the cost of vodka declined. In 1886, the state passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay their employees in vodka, but it had little impact on drinking rates. As with other countries, the state also increased license fees; they rose from 10 rubles in 1865 to 1,100 in 1885 and jacked up excise taxes on liquor. A reduction of liquor stores and a decline in consumption were the result (Herlihy 2002: 6; Schrad 2014: 122–3). Nevertheless, alcohol consumption continued to be problematic. To address it, Tsar Alexander III introduced the idea of government monopoly, which Nicholas II made a reality after Alexander’s untimely death. The State Vodka Monopoly, created in 1894, banned taverns where only drink was sold and established state-run liquor stores. Although private distillers still operated, they could sell only to state-owned vendors. Some argued that it actually increased drinking, since workers would bring their own vodka to their lunch and drink it surreptitiously, faster, and in greater quantities than were they to drink at a tavern (Herlihy 2002: 92; Shrad 2014: 176). Critics argued that these initiatives—dubbed “the drunken budget”—were nothing more than attempts to continue to profit from the sale of vodka. In 1895 to address such criticisms, the state set up The Guardianship of Public Sobriety. This large and well-funded temperance agency’s goal was to encourage moderation (but not total abstinence) and establish amusements to serve as alternatives to the pubs (Herlihy 2002: 15, 38; Shrad 2014: 176). Critics of the government’s actions with respect to the liquor monopoly were given louder voices after the October Revolution of 1905, which led to the establishment of the Duma and reduction of Tsarist power. The Revolution was partly the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, in which Russian forces were defeated, many believed, not by Japanese military power so much as by the drunkenness and consequent incapacity of the military. In contrast to the partisan nature of liquor control in other countries examined

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here, in Russia criticism of the State Vodka Monopoly came from all political directions. Left-leaning activists saw alcohol as a tool of oppression of the working class. Centrists felt that the decline of social order, as viewed in the 1905 revolution, was at least partly the result of the easy availability of vodka. Conservatives, claiming that drunkenness had been reduced in the countryside but was rampant in industrializing cities, used the issue of drunkenness to condemn modernization (Herlihy 2002: 134–5). The members of the Duma worked quickly to address the state alcohol monopoly, although its divisions made rapid success difficult. In 1907 a bill proposing a one-eighth reduction in alcohol production and a price increase did not pass. A 1911 bill imposed fines and imprisonment for bootlegging, reduced sales of vodka to one bottle per person per day, prohibited vodka sales in state buildings or places of amusement, and allowed village assemblies to ban liquor stores in their districts. The bill was approved by the Duma, but stalled in the State Council (the upper chamber) for two years, emerging significantly modified. One of the provisions that remained was local option (Herlihy 2002: 129–38). By 1914, as Patricia Herlihy notes, Tsar Nicholas had decided “the ‘drunken budget’ had to go” (2002: 138). Announcing that he would support any citizens who were fighting against drunkenness “by all means permitted by the law” the tsar had no choice but to act when over 800 municipalities petitioned to go dry. In August of the same year, as the First World War began, Nicholas decreed that all restaurants and clubs (except those “first class” restaurants patronized by elites) would have to cease the sale of vodka during the mobilization of the troops, a prohibition that soon extended to the duration of the war. (Phillips 2000: 17; Herlihy 2002: 138–9; Schrad 2014: 180–1). It was this decree that historians have called the institution of prohibition in Russia, although it was incomplete and created a patchwork of dry and not-so dry areas across the country.

World War One and Beyond Although it may be clichéd to say that the First World War “changed everything,” the war certainly saw significant events in the development of alcohol policy. Countries involved in the war invoked a range of liquor restrictions. Many of these were designed to deal with a concern over the scarcity of grains and other supplies vital to the war effort, but the power of prohibitionists helped to push austerity policies beyond what may have been necessary. After all, in both Canada and the United States during the Second World War, a longer war with even greater resource outlay, prohibition was never seriously considered. So when looking at liquor policy during the First World War, although the war initiated new restrictive legislation and policy experimentation, we cannot forget the influence of the pre-war prohibitionists upon the shape of that policy.

Britain Britain’s approach was framed by the concerns over national efficiency, the loud voices  of the prohibitionists, and the examples of allies (notably Russia and France) who were already acting to restrict trade in various areas of the liquor industry. As early as August 10, 1914, the Home Secretary had been asked to impose restrictions on licensees, resulting in legislation to allow licensing justices to limit hours of sale. By the

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end of the year, such restrictions were in place in nearly half of the licensing districts in England and Wales (Greenaway 2003: 91–2). In David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer until 1916 then Prime Minister, prohibitionists had an ally, and he increased restrictions although they fell well short of prohibition. He famously said that “we are fighting Germany, Austria and Drink, and, as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is Drink.” Lloyd George increased government control over factories, and over the drinks industry. Alcohol was not just a beverage; it was a strategic commodity in munitions (such as cordite) as well as medically useful. Still, alcoholic beverages could of course be considered detrimental to manufacturing: with increased wartime wages, workers could afford more booze, and be less efficient. Lloyd George sought agreements with unions over working conditions and control of manufacturing for managing the war industries. Alcohol was one such industry. He also asked notable social leaders to lead by example, convincing King George V to pledge (grudgingly) that his household would be abstinent for the duration of the war, a pledge followed by Lord Kitchener and the Archbishop of Canterbury (Greenaway 2003: 94–5). In April 1915, the government passed legislation that increased liquor taxes and gave itself broader powers to take over the drinks industry in areas of importance to the war effort. A month later, it created the Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic) (the CCB) to manage such strategic takeovers. Immediately, the CCB took control of the drinks industry in ten shipbuilding areas. Opening hours were reduced significantly, introducing the “afternoon gap” to ensure drinking coincided only with meal times; treating was banned; spirits sold in pubs were diluted; in some areas, spirits sales were prohibited on evenings and weekends; and private clubs were brought under the same rules as licensed public houses. By early 1916, the CCB had expanded its remit under the view that the entire country had been militarized for this total war (Greenaway 2003: 97–100; Nicholls 2009: 155–6; Duncan 2013). The CCB’s work was not just to create new restrictions; it also took what James Nicholls has called “an overtly constructive approach to the control of the drinks trade” (2009: 156). The CCB set up 840 industrial canteens at factories to counter the often mediocre meals served at nearby pubs. But it went further. With no room to expand the rifle factory in Enfield Lock, the CCB purchased four pubs near the factory and used them to provide lunches (while maintaining liquor sales). This excursion into Gothenburg-style disinterested management was more expansive in Carlisle, where the CCB purchased the entire drinks trade, controlling pubs, off-licenses, and four breweries in a 500 square miles area. It suppressed 104 licenses and improved the pubs that remained. Pub managers were not encouraged to sell more booze; they were encouraged, and rewarded, for maintaining order. Pushing its role further, in July 1916 the CCB opened a purpose-built pub, the Gretna Tavern, followed by the London Tavern, also in Gretna. These pubs offered facilities beyond traditional pub services, including bowling greens, billiards, large dining rooms, and even cinemas (Nicholls 2009: 156–7; Duncan 2013). The wartime experiment of the CCB ended with the passing of the Licensing Act (1921), dissolving the CCB and instituting new licensing regulations, but all did not revert back to the pre-war state. Drinking patterns had been seriously disrupted, consumption had plummeted, the “afternoon gap” had normalized the idea that pubs should open only at certain times, and state management was now a much more viable option than it had been prior to

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the war. Although total state ownership did not take hold, state management did remain in areas where it had been in place during the war, notably in Carlisle. What may be the most significant result of the wartime situation was the drive, in the immediate post-war period, to “improve” the pub. Inspired by the CCB’s new pub structures, many brewers took up the task of converting the pub into a more diversified, multi-function social space, with dining, dancing, cinemas, bowling, darts, any number of non-alcoholic activities. Some were placed in expanding housing estates in the suburbs, while others displaced old pubs in established areas. Legislators tried but failed to change licensing laws to facilitate such improvements (Nicholls 2009: 182). Opinions on the outcome of the improved pub movement varied. A Select Committee on the issue of disinterested management which also considered the improved pubs reported in 1927 that although the pub improvers had good intentions, some improved pubs alienated traditional pub patrons (Nicholls 2009: 182). In contrast, a 1929–31 Royal Commission struck to examine the social and economic aspects of the drink question, encouraged further improvement, and recommended establishing a National Licensing Commission. Greenaway argues that the commission’s report had little impact, and that the main issues it was examining, “local option, disinterested management and license reduction, were really, by now passé.” Indeed, this can be seen from the example of Scotland. In 1920, stringent liquor policies that had passed in 1913 came into effect (the legislation included a seven-year

Figure 3.4  The Redfern Inn, Etterby Carlisle. Photograph by Olive Seabury, from The Carlisle State Management Scheme, Its Ethos and Architecture: A 60 Year Experiment in Regulation of the Liquor Trade (Carlisle: Bookcase, 2007).

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ramp-up period). Before the war, the local option bill had been touted by prohibitionists as a great victory, but the result was, as Greenaway notes, “puny.” Of 1,215 Scottish areas, only 37 opted for limitation on licenses, and 36 for local veto (Greenaway 2003: 133, 146).

France Being literally on the front lines during the war, France acted quickly to effect change in liquor sales during the conflict, but as with earlier efforts, the actions often were mired in conflicting interests. In August 1914 the Interior Ministry banned absinthe, and the government promised legislation against alcoholism. Regional leaders were similarly motivated, with some prefects passing laws to reduce opening hours of debits and banning or restricting sales of other spirituous beverages. Such government actions initially received public support, with many social groups including unions voicing anti-alcohol rhetoric. Despite such patriotic overtures, when governments began to contemplate restrictions on the consumption of distilled alcohol, the liquor industry pushed back (Prestwich 1988: 154). Three pieces of legislation were introduced in 1915 to deal with alcohol during wartime. In January the government introduced a bill to prohibit new outlets that sold distilled alcohol over 23 percent. Amendments on the bill resulted in a law that was much less effective than had been hoped. A bill to strengthen the (essentially dead) anti-drunkenness law of 1873 took two years to wind through the labyrinth of parliament process, also emerging much weaker. Finally, the government introduced amendments to the regime des boissons which increased taxes, and reduced some traditional tax exemptions on household alcohol production, such as farmers making wine or cider. The privileges of such bouilliers de cru had been, up to this point, politically untouchable. As with the other legislation, it, too, was weaker after debate. Nevertheless, it did impose the significant restriction of requiring all industrial alcohol to be sold to the state, thereby removing it from the consumer market (Prestwich 1988: 157–61). More effective were efforts to reduce drinking in war zones, or by military personnel. Whereas the civilian government had been hamstrung by debates and industry influence, the military quickly moved to ban the consumption of distilled spirits in war zones. Its attempts to keep soldiers from stronger alcohol were not so successful in areas where soldiers and civilians mingled, and many illegal débits were reported behind the front lines. When the war ended, France saw both production and consumption levels return to pre-war levels. The government encouraged the increased production of wine, eased restrictions on debits to the point where, in 1931, the number of debits had reached pre-war levels, and by 1935 they far exceeded them. The ban on absinthe remained in effect, but the legislation was amended in 1922 to allow the sale of spirits similar to absinthe. By the 1930s, as Prestwich notes, successive governments “had become the alcohol industry’s reluctant captives” (Prestwich 1988: 202). Much of the government activity was driven by the competing interests of the wine or spirits industries. For example, when a wine overproduction crisis threatened to kill the wine industry, its allies in parliament ensured that the wartime restriction keeping industrial alcohol out of the consumer market remained in effect. But as plentiful harvests led to an increased glut of wine, prices fell and fears of uprisings in the countryside spurred the government to action. In 1935, it created a state alcohol monopoly, the Service des alcools, requiring

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distilled alcohol including products from wine, cider, or beets to be sold to the state, easing the pressure on the wine market but did nothing to address overproduction apart from attempt to open up new markets, or re-establish markets in countries like Canada and the United States, where prohibition had decimated its export industry (Prestwich 1988: 205–12).

Canada and the United States In first Canada, and later the United States, the First World War led to prohibition. Since the prohibition of sales of liquor was a provincial issue in Canada, prohibitory laws were enacted at different times across the country. Canada entered the war at the same time as Britain, and restricting the booze business quickly became an issue of national efficiency. Between early 1915 and late 1916, nearly all provinces enacted prohibition. Only Quebec moved slowly, passing legislation in early 1918 to abolish retail sales in May 1919 (Heron 2003: 179–81). Its actions came after the Dominion government passed a series of ordersin-council to halt importation, manufacture, and interprovincial trade of alcohol, effectively instituting prohibition on a national scale. This law was to be in effect until one year after the end of hostilities. National prohibition in the United States also came about during the war. On December 18, 1917, Congress passed a prohibition amendment (the Eighteenth Amendment) and sent it to the states for ratification (three-quarters of states need to ratify an amendment before it comes into effect). Impatient to see prohibition enacted, Congress passed a prohibition law on November 21, 1918. The constitutional amendment was ratified in January 1919 and came into effect one year later with the Volstead Act defining how it would operate (Blocker 1989; Pegram 1998; Szymanski 2003). Thus for a brief period after November 1918 until November 1919, prohibition was the law of the land in both northern countries of North America. Nevertheless, the differing scopes of the laws and the jurisdictional distinctions (provincial versus federal in Canada, in contrast to a constitutional amendment and national law in the United States) resulted in considerable variation of enforcement. In Canada, it remained legal to manufacture liquor, and in Ontario, for example, native wine sales were never made illegal (Malleck 2013a). The stories of smuggling across the Canada-US border are many, sensationalist, and even sometimes true, and the reader can refer to many books and documentaries on the time, mindful to maintain skepticism of such salacious stories. Yet one thing is clear: Canadian distillers operated a booming export business, legal on one side of the border, but illegal on the other. Mexican border towns were similarly affected during prohibition (Malleck 2013b: 746). Until 1930, the Canadian government took no interest in the fact that spirits were legally being exported into the United States, but their importation into that country was a violation of its own laws. Capitulating to US pressure, the Canadian government made it illegal to export liquor to the United States, although smuggling continued in excess (Siener 2008: 442–5). This capitulation was limited. When, by the 1930s, most Canadian provinces had repealed their prohibition legislation, they benefitted from the subsequent uptick in tourism by thirsty Americans. Whether they consumed their hooch in Canada or returned with it to the United States was of little concern to Canadian authorities.

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Figure 3.5  Wayne Bidwell Wheeler (1869–1927). American attorney and prohibitionist. Member of the Anti-Saloon League. Image by Universal History Archive via Getty Images.

The end of prohibition in Canada resulted in a range of liquor control regimes across the country. Quebec made the sale of light beer, cider, and wine legal in hotels, taverns, cafes, corner stores, and clubs as early as 1919. Two years later, concerned about the excessive amount of bootlegging and smuggling of spirits, the government instituted government control of spirits sales, a system that remains to this day (Heron 2003: 272). Quebec’s

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experience was the most liberal, but the pattern was normally the same: allowing limited availability of some products followed by a gradual opening up of the system. Consider British Columbia, which created government stores in 1921, but permitted no public drinking. In 1924, a referendum on public drinking (usually called “beer by the glass” legislation) was won by the Drys. Yet the referendum legislation allowed jurisdictions in which the Wets had carried the day to institute licensed public beer drinking, a kind of reverse local option. To the north, in Yukon Territory, the time line was roughly the same as BC, with government control in 1921 and beer by the glass in 1925. Prohibition was dismantled in a similar piecemeal way, moving roughly west to east from 1923 to 1930. PEI retained prohibition until 1948, with repeal plebiscites in 1929 and 1940 reiterating the dry hegemony (Campbell 1991; Heron 2003: 272–6). Government control involved oversight of manufacture, sale, and purchase. For example, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, like many other provinces, initially required customers to possess a permit in which all purchases would be logged. Distilleries, wineries, and breweries could sell at shops on site which were scrutinized by government inspectors. Wineries were allowed one shop each, but as large wineries purchased smaller ones, they had the right to open additional stores. Breweries were allowed to consolidate their distribution system in a cooperative brewers’ warehouse system, which was incorporated as the Brewer’s Warehouse Corporation in 1928. In 1934 months after prohibition ended in the United States, the province passed beer by the glass legislation, permitting beer in hotel beverage rooms and beer and wine in hotel dining rooms with a meal. Clubs, steam ships, and trains could also be licensed (Heron 2003: 280; Malleck 2012; Malleck 2013a). Whereas the liquor control systems in Canadian provinces generally had similar elements and trends of implementation, the end of national prohibition in the United States resulted in a much more complex patchwork of liquor distribution systems. As the Twenty First Amendment (the amendment that would repeal the Eighteenth) wound its way through the various approval mechanisms, early in 1933 Congress modified the Volstead Act to allow sales of beer of 3.2 percent Alcohol by Weight (ABW) or 4 percent Alcohol by Volume. States scrambled to create legislation to facilitate its sale, well before Utah became the thirty-sixth and final state to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment in December 1933 (Blocker 1989: 128). States took a variety of approaches to managing alcohol. Eight states (Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Kansas) retained state prohibition at the outset, but by 1950 only Oklahoma and Mississippi continued to be dry. By the 1950s, twenty-nine states had adopted a licensing system, where the government, either state or local (or a combination), issued licenses to private businesses to sell liquor (Barker 1955: 20–4). For example, New York State, after a series of consultations and investigations, created a system of state control of liquor, but with private sale, a system Springfield calls “an off premise retail system as close to the Quebec plan without having full government sale.” It also permitted, amidst much controversy, liquor to be sold in bars (2013: 63–4, 76–8). The third approach to deal with liquor regulation after prohibition was through a government monopoly. It is the form that most Canadian provinces adopted, with government agencies running all wholesale and retail operations. Within two years of Repeal, fifteen states had adopted a government monopoly. By 1939, seventeen had taken this strategy. The connection between Canadian and American systems is significant.

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Nearly all states sharing a border with Canada apart from New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota took on the monopoly system. Wisconsin and Minnesota, although not creating government monopolies, allowed municipalities to take control of the sales, creating sort of local monopoly option by the 1950s (Barker 1955: 26–7). Whatever the policy, the trend after prohibition in both Canada and the United States was away from strict control and toward more liberal approaches. This movement away from prohibition may have happened because temperance movements faltered after their dream of prohibition was shattered. But it must also be attributed to the fact that, as several historians have argued, prohibition seems to have worked. Although it did not last forever, prohibition significantly altered drinking behavior, most notably in the volume of beverage alcohol that people were drinking (Burnham 1968; Heron 2003: 265–6; Blocker 2006).

Russia Prohibition lasted past the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks extended the wartime prohibition measures, closing all wine and spirits factories, prohibiting the production or sale of alcohol, and establishing a Commissariat for the Struggle against Alcoholism and Gambling. Yet alcohol always fights back, and the Bolshevik measures led to illegal distilling and hundreds of thousands of prosecutions for brewing or selling illegal spirits. In 1921, the first New Economic Policy (NEP) permitted farmers to dispose of grain surpluses as they saw fit; liquor distillation was a profitable way to do this. Concerned that this practice was redirecting essential grain from the food supply, later in 1921 the government legalized alcohol sales, beginning with wines, and adding beer six months later. In 1923 it legalized the sale of 40-proof liquor (roughly half the strength of traditional vodka). In 1925 it began making 80-proof vodka, ending entirely prohibition and instituting a new government monopoly. Although it is difficult to tell given the general limited evidence from the revolutionary period, it appears that post-prohibition consumption of liquor was slightly lower than pre-war (and pre-prohibition) levels (Philips 2000: 20–1; Transchel 2003: 580; Schrad 2014: 225–8). Embattled on all sides geographically, the revolutionary government was not ready to give up entirely the fight with alcohol. In 1928, a group of state officials and medical professionals created The Society for the Struggle against Alcoholism (known by its Russian acronym OBSA), which sought further restrictions on production, sale, and consumption of liquor and launched a campaign to encourage abstinence. OBSA’s literature included familiar temperance messages such as drinking led to drunkenness, criminality, madness, and death. By the 1930s, however, the state’s new position was that socialism and the socialist life would cure drunkenness, and the government encouraged OBSA to refocus on urging improvements to everyday life. In 1931, it changed its name to the Society for Healthy Living and ended its anti-alcohol messaging. This was part of a new (or, rather, quite old) strategy in which the state needed alcohol revenues to survive. Discussions of drunkenness ceased, the temperance movement was silenced, and by 1940 the Soviet Union had more shops selling liquor than the combined number of stores selling meat, fruit, and vegetables (Transchel 2003: 580–1). The secrecy of the Soviet government during this time makes further information about liquor policy difficult to uncover. As Schrad has noted, discussions on such policy remain categorized as state secrets (2014: 225).

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Figure 3.6  Customers at the counter in a liquor store in Moscow, Russia, c. 1950, where alcohol prices are high and vodka is the most expensive spirit available. Photograph by Three Lions via Getty Images.

The Second World War and After By the end of the 1930s, liquor policy had taken on a much more moderate tone. It is telling that during the Second World War, although liquor supplies were rationed, and despite loud entreaties from the Drys, prohibition did not return in either Canada or the United States. There, and in Britain, the strategy was taxation for revenue purposes, some rationing, but a decided shift in focus. In Canada, the prime minister met delegations of temperance supporters who urged him to institute prohibition yet again, and although a Liberal and therefore the traditional supporter of temperance, Prime Minister W. L. M. King chose not to take that route. He did encourage provinces to strictly reduce opening hours, and through the Wartime Trade and Pricing Commission instituted liquor rationing, but prohibition was a non-starter (Heron 2003: 295; Malleck 2012: Ch 9). In Britain and the United States, reactions to temperance entreaties were even less positive. British leaders saw the possibility of serious reduction of beer supplies in the interest of wartime productivity as decidedly counter-productive. Lord Woolton, Minister of Food, declared in 1940 that government must maintain both life and “the morale” of the people; beer was important to that latter goal. As Nicholls put it, “beer was too rich a signifier of those [British] cultural values to be subjected to official condemnation” (Nicholls 2009: 188). In the United States, as Blocker notes, “federal officials turned a deaf ear to dry advice.” Government required brewers to set aside 15 percent of their production

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for military consumption and deemed brewery workers essential services. Although spirit distillation was banned in 1942, the government paid distillers to convert their facilities to industrial production and even declared “liquor holidays” in 1944 and 1945 allowing distillers to produce beverage alcohol (Blocker 1989: 138–9). It did not hurt that, as with Canada and Britain, increased liquor taxation boosted wartime revenues. In France, the collapse of the Third Republic in 1940 led many anti-alcohol advocates to argue that the country’s permissive approach to liquor regulation had resulted in national degeneration and the German invasion. Without a parliament to debate and modify legislation, the Vichy leadership quickly imposed restrictions on alcohol production and sale, including dividing debits into four types, and licensing them differently. The new laws, combined with shortages in wine and industrial alcohol, significantly reduced consumption and alcoholism (Prestwich 1988: 246–8, 256). At the end of the war, however, and despite the pledge by the provisional government to retain alcohol restrictions, as the drink industry regained its strength, many wartime regulations were either dismantled, or simply not enforced.

Scandinavia as a Case Study in Differences The expansive national histories above provide details on how liquor licensing operated on a relatively broad scale, but what may be lost in the details is an emphasis upon national distinctions and liquor legislation. As Siedsel Eriksen has found in her comparisons between Denmark and Sweden (1990), variations in policy are significant, depending upon the vested interests in the different countries. What follows is a brief overview of the comparison she provides, in order to direct the reader toward some key issues to consider when thinking about national differences.

Denmark The Danish government saw alcohol taxes as a way of generating revenue. In 1843, it instituted a tax on alcohol production and simultaneously cracked down on illicit home production. Although this move also had some vague temperance or at least moderationist reasoning behind it, the sort of evangelical temperance agitation of the Anglo-American world did not take hold in Denmark. The Lutheran priesthood did not approve of moral societies operating outside of the church, and thus the sort of multi-denominational and evangelical approaches to temperance that took hold elsewhere did not become influential movements in Denmark (Eriksen 2003a: 193). More influential were the liberalizing tendencies of the later nineteenth century. In 1873, the government made it easier to obtain a saloon keeper license. The powerful breweries of Carlsberg and Tuborg influenced the idea that beer was a healthy drink and a substitute for traditional distilled liquor. A new, non-Lutheran temperance movement did emerge, but it did not have the extent or the longevity of temperance movements elsewhere. Although it grew to 10 to 15 percent of the population, it was centered in the more agricultural parts of the country, and did not have strong support in urban areas. It did, however, include a small group of influential intellectuals and professionals who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, encouraged the government to impose restrictive alcohol legislation as a way

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of solving social problems. Strategies included local option and restrictions on the ease of obtaining a tavern license (Eriksen 2003a: 193–4). Denmark felt the pressures of diminished food production during the First World War, and these pressures affected alcohol production. For three months in the beginning of 1917, the government forbade the production, transportation, and sale of distilled spirit and kept production low after the ban ended. The government also instituted high taxes on spirits, which, combined with the restrictions on production, further inflated spirits prices rapidly changing Denmark from a spirits-drinking culture, to a beer-drinking one. Tuborg and Carlsberg were joined by a worker’s cooperative brewery, Star, established to direct revenues from the worker’s “natural” beer-drinking preferences back to benefit workers themselves (Eriksen 2003a: 194). Unlike other Scandinavian countries, the taxation on private production was a preferred government strategy to the state monopolies of Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Norway.

Sweden In Sweden beer was considered the traditional drink, but drinking shifted to distilled spirits—aquavit—in the 1700s, and home distilling was widespread throughout the countryside. A temperance movement emerged in the first part of the nineteenth century, modelled on American evangelical temperance (many Swedes learned of this movement in letters from family in the United States). As with Denmark, evangelical temperance was decried by the Lutheran hierarchy. Yet it had some results. The Swedish Temperance Society, which formed due to concerns over widespread home distillation, disappeared after legislation passed banning the practice in 1855. Yet temperance was not dead. Its supporters influenced the creation of Gothenburg’s system of disinterested management which originated when the town took ownership first of taverns, and later of retail liquor shops. The Gothenburg system never became a national policy; it was adopted in and spread among municipalities. Prohibition became a major issue in Sweden by the turn of the century. In 1909, a referendum held by temperance societies showed that over 55 percent of the population wanted prohibition. In response, the government created a committee to investigate the issue further. One of the committee’s members, physician Ivan Bratt proposed that the government focus upon controlling the individual’s purchasing, and removing the profit motive from alcohol sales, an approach that became known as the “Bratt system.” In 1914, Stockholm experimented with alcohol ration books (the “motbok”) which recorded all alcohol purchases. This system was adopted nationally in 1917 and lasted until 1955. The other recommendation, the adoption of state control, resulted in the wholesale liquor trade being consolidated in one state-controlled company, while municipalities controlled retail sales and private restaurants. Strict rules limited how much alcohol an individual could consume with a restaurant meal (Eriksen 2003b: 605). This system lasted beyond 1955; although it came under threat when Sweden joined the EU in 2001, the state stores remained intact.

Liquor, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples In an era of imperialism, those peoples who were conquered, subjugated, or assimilated were frequently the targets of stringent liquor regulations. European imperialists often saw

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aboriginal people as incapable of consuming alcohol without significant physical and social upheaval. This was a cultural imperialism masked in pseudo-genetic notions of race. In Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and much of Africa, the Eurocentric view saw alcohol as a more significant problem among indigenous peoples than among non-native, “white” communities. Hence, the approach to regulating often veered toward the more extreme form: prohibition. In North America, as more native lands came under control of settler governments, liquor to natives was strictly controlled and usually forbidden. In Canada, the terms of the treaties from the middle of the nineteenth century made native people the wards of the crown, effectively infantilizing them. Selling liquor to native people was mostly illegal in Canada until the middle of the twentieth century (Heron 2003: 133–5; Campbell 2008; Malleck 2012: 189–92). In the United States around the same time, Congress used its constitutional authority to regulate commerce with native peoples. After passing several laws against liquor sales to native people, in 1892 Congress passed legislation that sought to eradicate the sale and trade in liquor entirely when native people were involved (Abbott 2003: 448). Likewise in Australia and New Zealand, policies targeted the seeming inability for native people to manage alcohol. In New South Wales, for example, sales to them were banned from 1838, with all Australian states having similar laws by the 1920s (Brady 2001: 759–60; Blainey 2003: 77; Wilson et al. 2010: 7). Aborigines could be exempt from the laws only if they could demonstrate that they were suitably assimilated into non-aboriginal culture. In New Zealand, in contrast to other countries examined here, Maori were not entirely banned from drinking alcohol, although as with other countries, the idea behind strict licensing of sales of liquor to Maori was presented as “protecting” them. Often restrictions on liquor were initiated by Maori themselves. Whereas an 1847 ordinance prohibited sale of liquor to native people entirely, by the 1870s laws became more moderate. From 1870 licensing rather than prohibition was normally the pattern, allowing Maori communities to control access to liquor in regions where they dominated. As a result, in the King Country region in the North Island, Maori requested liquor be banned entirely in 1884. Elsewhere, Maori had limited access, but access nonetheless, to liquor (MacDonald 2003: 454; Cook 2014). A licensing amendment of 1910 allowed Maori men who lived outside of prohibition areas to drink liquor only in licensed premises (not purchase it to take away) and declared women who married non-Maori men to have “full drinking rights,” not unlike native women in Canada who married non-native men (Saggers and Gray 1998: 46–7). By the time European nations were taking extensive colonial involvement in Africa, the temperance movement was a serious influence on policy. British temperance organizations united in the rather awkwardly but descriptively named United Committee for the Prevention of the Demoralization of the Native Races by the Liquor Trade and pushed for restrictions on sales of liquor in Africa (Willis 2001; Willis 2003a: 312). Ironically, as Pani notes, liquor revenues and taxes had played a significant role in funding colonial enterprises (1975: 14–15). In the 1884 Berlin Conference, where European powers essentially divided up Africa, the British delegation proposed restrictions on the free transit of liquor into Africa, but German and Dutch delegates resisted. They knew that such a proposal put Britain in a strong position, since any restriction on free transit meant British authorities could collect high duties on liquor entering via key transportation conduits like the Niger River (Pani 1975: 31–2). However, the 1890 Brussels Conference, which was ostensibly about suppressing the slave

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trade, placed significant limits on the importation and sale of European liquor in many African countries (Heap 1998: 23–4). Part of Africa would be a “prohibition zone” whereas other areas would be subject to high duties. The measures passed due to the combination of a vocal temperance lobby and the lure of high revenues from the import duties (Pani 1975: 33–6). At the same time, colonial authorities, in Britain at least, were concerned not to ban native liquors, preferring licensing and regulation (Pani 1975: 20–3; Willis 2001: 57). Subsequent Brussels conferences in 1899, 1906, and 1912 further increased taxes on liquor. After the First World War, a conference at Saint Germain-en-Laye in 1919 extended bans on the importation of certain types of alcohol (Pani 1975: 41–5).

Conclusions Various governments have taken assorted approaches to the management of the sale and consumption of liquor over time. In the period of the 1850s to 1950s, in most countries the approach shifted from general open sale to increasingly strict management of the sale of liquor. Except in Russia, the motivation seemed to be moderationist in general, with the interest in restricting sales motivated by various temperance movements. In the AngloAmerican cases, the laissez-faire impulse was replaced only gradually, with liquor interests continuing to have various degrees of influence over government policy. In Scandinavia this was also the case, with Denmark especially seeing the power of the breweries in constraining any interest in prohibition or strict control. Russia’s unique case of a long history of government control for the main purpose of revenues is an exception that proves the rule. The push for moderation, coming from all parties after the 1905 revolution, shows that such a policy, seemingly rapacious and profiting from the misery many saw arising from excessive drinking, demonstrates the intricate connection between politics and liquor. To resist liquor revenues was, in Russia, to resist tsarist authority. Liquor was a firmly political issue, while conversely, liquor helped people ease the economic and emotional strife they may have experienced in revolutionary times. The intricate nature of liquor policy presented in this chapter should be a reminder that it is inadvisable to make any broad generalizations about the relationship between governance and liquor policy. In democracies where free speech is generally accepted, policy is not normally created through simple motivations. Temperance sentiment, moderationism, religious perspectives, brewery and distillery interests, and ideas of the strength of a nation (seen in the wartime austerity) all combine in shaping liquor policy. And as the case of Oliver Mowat in Ontario indicates, even when a party is supported by temperance advocates, the liquor industry can have significant sway over policy. The nuances make liquor policy a fascinating topic, and like an alcoholic, we are drawn to and repulsed by this alluring, pain-inducing yet inevitably complex substance called liquor policy formation.

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4 COMMERCE GINA HAMES

Introduction The period of history spanning the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century can be characterized by the global transformations brought on by the Industrial Revolution. As part of the same tide of change, the business of alcohol matured through periods of extraordinary innovations as well as devastating setbacks. Although only spanning roughly one hundred years, the monumental economic and political changes that took place cannot best be understood as one era, but as having two rather distinct breaks that each ushered in new phases. The first stage, from roughly the mid-nineteenth century up to the beginning of the First World War, is distinguished by innovation and technological advancement which brought to the alcohol industry mass production, the beginnings of advertising, and rising numbers of middle-class consumers with disposable income to consume new alcoholic commodities. The second stage, which spanned from the beginning of the First World War through 1933, featured the increasing impact of temperance on the industry, the disruption of markets brought on by the war, and the upheavals resulting from Prohibition in the United States as well as in parts of Canada. Finally, the years from the end of Prohibition in 1933 up to roughly 1950 saw a sharp increase in the consolidation of breweries and distilleries, another war-related disruption in the Second World War, and then dramatic shifts in the industries after the Second World War with the meteoric rise of advertising, which forever changed the nature of alcohol commerce.

1850–1914 The latter half of the nineteenth century up to the beginning of the First World War witnessed dramatic innovations affecting the business of alcohol. Technological and scientific changes, transportation expansion, and the nascent advertising practices transformed the commerce of beer, spirits, and wine. Mechanical refrigeration, the use of thermometers, the introduction of pasteurization, and the manipulation of yeast revolutionized brewing. The invention of the continuous still transformed distilling, and pasteurization modernized the wine industry. The wine business also suffered setbacks, though, through a series of devastating epidemics, particularly the phylloxera epidemic of the late nineteenth century that wiped out thousands of acres of vines across Europe, rupturing the steady development of winemaking in the nineteenth century. One could argue that during this period beer enjoyed the most popularity among alcohol beverages. Particularly in Western Europe and the United States, its appeal grew as

innovation and technology modernized the industry. Innovation brought the use of thermometers to monitor the brewing process; the use of the hydrometer to monitor specific gravities, leading to more precise fermentation times; and the production of pure yeast on a larger resulting in fewer failed batches of beer (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 18, 25). Perhaps the greatest technological innovation in this period that helped the beer industry was the development of mechanical refrigeration, which became viable for the industry with the patent of a successful commercial ice maker in 1873. Refrigeration particularly aided the year-round production of lager beer. (Poelmans and Swinnen 2011: 15; Patterson and Swinnen 2014: 37). Lager, which was paler and lighter, with more carbonation and less alcohol than ale (Patterson and Swinnen 2014: 39), became the favorite of northern German workers who could easily conceal a bottle to drink at work without undue effects (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 75, 102). Refrigeration enabled European beer makers to meet the growing demand for lager (Bavarian-styled beer), and as the market for lager grew across Europe and in the United States, its popularity expanded the entire market for beer. By the late 1870s, it had almost replaced ales as the beer of choice. Exports from Bavaria, for example, rose from 6,755 hectoliters in 1860 to 1,024,665 hectoliters by 1886 (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 20). The trend toward lager continued to grow as it followed German immigration into the United States and across the west in the nineteenth century (Patterson and Swinnen 2014: 40). Improvements in transportation and mechanization also facilitated growth in the beer market. The railroad allowed breweries to expand markets as they could ship their beer faster and cheaper. Railroads made it possible for the already regionally dominant breweries to become nationally known, unfortunately, some argue, at the cost of many small, local breweries that could no longer compete. Shipping by rail led to less breakage, and refrigerated boxcars allowed beer to be kept fresh through longer journeys (Bellamy 2012: 16). In Ireland’s countryside, for example, the railroad allowed Guinness to expand its markets, which displaced many small, local breweries throughout Ireland, and enlarged Guinness’s market share by 400 percent (Yenne 2007: 38). The number of breweries in Ireland dwindled from a high of 245 in 1835 to only 38 by 1900, an 85 percent decrease across the country. By the 1890s large commercial brewers controlled 90 percent of the market (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 5, 111). In addition, toward the end of the century most of the processes associated with beer became mechanized. Electrification made this possible. Mechanized cleaning and pasteurization of kegs and bottles led to fewer ruined batches of beer (Poelmans and Swinnen 2011: 16), and, in part, led to breweries bottling their own beer, as in the past they had sent their barreled beer out to bottling companies. Beer bottles could now be produced at the rate of up to 6,000 per hour (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 78). More bottles meant that more beer could be preserved longer and be remain stable during transportation. The next predominant trend in the history of beer involved the rapid change in the dominant business model for the industry. Originally made up of cottage industries, it developed into big businesses, and those businesses soon integrated vertically. Vertical integration added to the growth of large breweries by allowing them to control all aspects of the business. Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis exemplified this trend as it owned its own bottling plant, grain elevators, cellars, a steam and electric plant, wagons, a cooper shop, and its own railroad to connect freight terminals (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 181).

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Figure 4.1  Anheuser Busch Brewery, St. Louis, Missouri, late nineteenth century. Image by Bettman via Getty Images.

These large breweries required more workers, which changed the character of the ­ orkplace. As with workers in other growing nineteenth-century industries, brewery workers w began to unionize. In New York, brewery workers founded Brewer’s Union No. 1 in 1884, initially as a part of the Knights of Labor. Within one year the union had expanded to the New York metropolitan area, and it became the Brewer’s, Beer Drivers, and Maltsters Union. The union continued its rapid spread, and by 1886 it included workers from Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and even Detroit; and these groups went on to form a national union, the Union of Brewery Workmen (UBW), one of the first industrial unions. The UBW made the decision in 1887 to join the American Federation of Labor, moving from the Knights of Labor because of their increasingly prohibitionist stance (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 182). These larger, capital-rich breweries set themselves apart, too, by embracing the new sales strategy of advertising. Brewers learned that marketing could exponentially increase their business. The trajectory of advertising began with branding. Benjamin Lee Guinness, for example, chose a logo for his company in 1862, carefully deciding upon the Brian Boru harp, which was one of the three oldest surviving Gaelic harps, and which had been used as a model for the Coat of Arms of Ireland. His decision visually tied Guinness to Ireland, giving it a sense of place, identity, and heritage in the consciousness of its customers (Yenne 2007: 37). The proliferation of logos allowed numerous beers to take on particular images, and beer drinkers to “borrow” some of those images by consuming the brewer’s product. Appealing, marketable associations became more important in an increasingly competitive market. Carling Brewery of Ontario, Canada, clamored to keep up with the trend by naming one of their early beers Carling’s Imperial Club Lager, which appealed to those Canadians

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who wanted to see themselves as affiliated with the Empire (Fahey and Miller 2013: 139). Marketing only continued to influence the course of the beer industry, furthering the trend of market concentration in the hands of fewer and fewer companies. The spirits trade possessed characteristics similar to that of beer. Technological change revolutionized the industry, and a restructured business model along with the increased use of advertising formed the new face of spirits. The 1831 patent by Aeneas Coffey of the continuous or column still, which came into popular use in the second half of the century, remade the industry, allowing for more efficient and continual production of spirits like whiskey1 (Veach 2013: 438, 444; McMichael, this volume). The taste differed, too. Its smoother flavor opened the whiskey market up to many more customers. This, perhaps more than anything else, facilitated the expansion of the trade from a cottage industry to big business. Some of the Scottish distilleries that embraced this change included the Haigs, Dewars, Walkers, Mackies (White Horse), along with James Buchanan and William Sanderson (VAT69). These companies also led the industry in marketing, helping to make the new blended whiskey a popular drink (Daiches 2002: 1038, 1054). Later in the century the steam engine made an almost equal impact on the industry. It allowed for both mass production of whiskey and improved shipping through rail. By 1860, over 30,000 miles of railroad tracks criss-crossed the United States, and by 1869 a transcontinental railroad had completed the link between east and west, opening markets across the country. Within the distilleries, the new ability to heat warehouses accommodated yearround aging, rather than limiting it to the warm summer months, thus speeding up the aging process, bringing about higher production rates. Many scientifically based improvements such as closer temperature monitoring, use of a hydrometer to check alcohol levels, and use of litmus paper to check the pH at each step of the process brought increased profits, as well, to the distillers who implemented them. Non-mechanical developments within the distillery also led to higher profits. In 1879, Frederick Stitzel, of Louisville, Kentucky, patented a system of tiered storage racks for barrels. Barrels, both in the United States and Europe, had been stored one on top of the other, up to three or four high, each resting on the lid of the lower barrel. The weight of the stack caused leaks, opening the barrels to seeping air, which promoted the growth of mold and added a musty taste to the whiskey. The new system laid barrels on tiers of wooden racks, allowing for air to circulate around the barrels, preventing leakage, and making all levels of barrels easily accessible (Veach 2013: 383, 465, 474, 488). The business structure for distilleries began to change in the late nineteenth century, just as it had for breweries. Consolidations grew in number and these larger companies came to dominate the industry. By the late nineteenth century just five firms controlled much of the Scotch whisky industry: John Dewar, John Walker, White Horse, James Buchanan, and the Distillers Company Ltd., or DCL. The DCL itself had resulted from an earlier merger of six firms in 1877, and William Ross, its general manager, continually campaigned for the four remaining large distilleries to merge with his company, which did eventually occur in the 1920s (Rosie 2002: 382, 385). Consolidation characterized the American whiskey industry as well. At the end of the nineteenth century, several American distillers formed the Distillers’ and Cattle Feed Trust, which included up to sixty-five distilleries at its peak, most located in Illinois and western and central Kentucky. Although it was never able to dictate the price of whiskey, it did control much of the industry, with a particular goal to inhibit

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overproduction and thus guard against lower prices, which had occurred in the 1870s. The government eventually ruled that the group violated anti-trust laws, and broke up the trust in the 1890s, forming three separate companies—the Kentucky Distilleries and Warehouse Co., the American Spirits Manufacturing Co., and Standard Distilling and Distributing Co. of America, all under the parent company, Distillers’ Securities Corporation (Veach 2013: 768). Irish whiskey distilleries, too, followed patterns similar to their Scottish and American counterparts. The leading distilleries played an important role in the global market, even outselling Scotch whisky in the nineteenth century (Kosar 2010: 44). Sales had steadily grown in the second half of the nineteenth century primarily because of the concentration of production in the hands of a few large, blended whiskey producers. The large, predominantly column-still, blended-whiskey companies gained new global business, while the traditional pot distillers were increasingly left out of the rapidly growing international market. Between 1870 and 1900 production doubled, peaking at 9.9 million gallons, 60 percent of which was for export, most of it from the thirty largest distilleries. Much of the blended whiskey, which was produced largely in the north of the country, made its way to England to be re-distilled into gin (Kosar 2010: 77–9). At the same time, though, due to the phylloxera epidemic, both Irish and Scotch whiskies made it into the club and salon market in England (McArthur 2002: 884). In addition, the United States became an important market as whiskey consumption for men and women over aged fifteen increased to almost ten gallons per year, compared to less than one gallon in the late twentieth century. Unfortunately, industry success brought on overproduction, and along with a weakening international economy, led to a slowdown after 1900 (Kosar 2010: 95). As the handful of industry giants came to rule the market in Europe, Canada, and the United States, they increasingly turned to advertising to gain a competitive edge. Scotch whisky companies had the double task of not only proving the worth of their product, but also disproving entrenched negative perceptions surrounding it, as Scotch whisky had been perceived by the English upper class to be a “robust, outdoor drink with perhaps some health-giving qualities,” associated with the lower classes, and therefore “unsuitable for club or salon” (McArthur 2002: 869). Rather, brandy, wine, and gin were deemed socially superior (Ehmer et al. 2015: 143). Several factors in the mid- to late nineteenth century, taken together, began to turn the tide. The English upper class increasingly vacationed in the Scottish Highlands; then King George IV visited, even donning a tartan; and finally, in 1852, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria purchased Balmoral Castle. These developments led to a growing appreciation of the Scottish highlands, and thus Scotch whisky. Furthermore, the phylloxera epidemic of the late 1800s that wiped out nearly 80 percent of the grape vines all across Europe rendered wine scarce; and the new blended whisky, with its smoother flavor, began to draw a wider audience (McArthur 2002: 884). Combined, these factors added up to Scotch whisky’s growing marketability as an elite drink. Scotch whisky producers pushed the trend along by increasingly turning to advertising. Scotland’s John Dewar and Sons distillery banked on elite consumers’ desires to identify with tradition, longevity, and a romantic (masculine) Scottish past. They designed a label that sported a Scottish soldier in his kilt and feathered bonnet. Clearly marketing to a male audience, they believed men could identify with the idealized masculinity of a Scotsman, which had become a popular icon in much of Scotch advertising in the late nineteenth century. Dewar’s was one of the first to borrow the symbol; and to avoid possible jealousies

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Figure 4.2  Royal Blend whisky advertisement, “Fit for a Prince,” c.1890–1900. Image by History of Advertising Trust/Heritage Images via Getty Images.

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Figure 4.3  Scotch whisky “White Label” John Dewar advertisement, 1953. Image by Apic via Getty Images.

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among regiments, the designers carefully camouflaged the uniform, so the mustachioed, kilt wearing pipe-major could fit any Highland regiment (Rosie 2002: 380). While whiskey dominated the Western European and US spirits’ market during this period, vodka controlled the market in Eastern Europe. The most well-known producer of vodka, Pyotr Smirnov, had begun his distillery in 1864, and by 1872 he employed over sixty workers and produced up to 100,000 pails of vodka, grossing 600,000 rubles annually, equaling almost 7 million American dollars at 2014 levels. Smirnov’s vodka not only quenched the thirst of Russians, but it also won prizes at international fairs. He brought vodka to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where it won medals and even caught the attention of the New York Times, which praised his products. By 1886, he had won the recognition of Czar Alexander III, who officially endorsed the vodka, allowing Smirnov to display the honor on his labels. Smirnov was so successful that when he died in 1898 he was one of the richest men in Russia, worth the equivalent of 132 million in 2014 dollars. Perhaps his death was timely, though, as the Russian state took over the sale of vodka in state-run liquor stores in 1896, foreshadowing the twentieth-century Soviet practice of a state liquor monopoly (Matus 2014: 12, 17). The highly regulated sale of vodka led to rampant adulteration, not to mention illegal production. Tavern keepers were so notorious for watering their vodka that patrons were known to set their glasses outside in the cold Russian weather to see if it froze or not (Schrad 2014: 101). European imperialism led to an increase in markets for distilled spirits, specifically in Africa. Alcohol became such a large issue in many of the newly colonized regions in Africa in the 1880s and 1890s that it was the single most important import, in both value and volume to the colonies. It was used as currency throughout many colonies. For example, between 30 and 40 percent of southern Nigeria’s exports were traded for alcohol in the early twentieth century. Alcohol was such an important import to the colonies that its import duties in Cote d’Ivoire and the Gold Coast in the early twentieth century were 46 percent and 38 percent of their revenues respectively (Phillips 2014: 220–1). Much like the beer and spirits industries, wine benefitted from both scientific innovation that led to increased and more stable outputs, and advertising which gave some wineries an edge over the competition. The wine business, though, also experienced a devastating aphid infestation in the late nineteenth century in France, parts of Spain, and Italy, called phylloxera. Phylloxera came to define the history of the wine business in this period. One scholar noted that to understand the wine industry it must be broken into two distinct periods: before phylloxera and after phylloxera (Phillips 2000: 287). The outbreak helped spur on wine production of what would later be called “New World” wines. Argentina, Australia, and California in the United States began to produce wine in greater volumes. In Argentina, for example, the influx of Spanish and Italian immigrants did for its wine industry what earlier German immigration to the United States had done for its beer industry. Southern European immigrants to Argentina consumed 80 percent of the wine produced in the country, up to 62 liters per capita per year (Stein 2014: 212). Before the outbreak, though, important scientific improvements had resulted in increased output in France, and improved planting practices in increased yields. Louis Pasteur’s discoveries regarding yeast and fermentation, leading to pasteurization, also resulted in fewer ruined bottles of wine. France, in particular, saw a dramatic rise in wine production in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a result of these innovations. In 1840, French

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wineries had produced 51 liters of wine per capita, but by 1872 production had grown to 77 liters per capita (Phillips 2000: 222–3, 231–2, 287). Increased production led to an escalating desire by wine regions and individual wineries to differentiate themselves from each other. Many wine regions in France produced wine of average quality, but others stood out as producers of high-quality wines, and it was these regions that began to employ marketing (Phillips 2000: 222). The region of Bordeaux, especially, earned this reputation. Bordeaux’s popularity skyrocketed in the nineteenth century, “attain[ing] unprecedented cultural prestige,” becoming a favorite of the expanding middle class, and creating even more competition among the vintners in the region. Bordeaux winemakers attempted to set themselves apart by suggesting their long heritage going back even as far as Renaissance castles, by using the word “chateau” in the names of their estates (Lukacs 2012: 127, 140). The practice proved successful, which is illustrated by the exponential growth of its use. In 1855, only five estates called themselves “Chateau,” but by 1874 over 700 wineries had included the designation, an increase of almost 14,000  percent, and between 1874 and 1893 the number increased another 85 percent to 1,300 (Clarke 2015: 1393). Champagne houses, too, began advertising to differentiate themselves from their competitors as their product became increasingly popular with the middle class. Much like with the purchase of fine wine, the purchase of champagne allowed the growing middle

Figure 4.4  Duminy & Co. champagne advertisement. The advertisement for Duminy & Co, wholesale agents of champagne, features an illustration of their premises in Ay, a town in the French province of Champagne. Image by Science & Society Picture Library via Getty Images.

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class to emulate an elite lifestyle, in this case, represented by the “festival in a bottle” that champagne provided. Champagne houses created posters showcasing products, and even labels to demonstrate the elegance and beguiling nature of their bubbly. The proliferation of posters to tout the joys of champagne became emblematic of champagne marketing throughout the latter part of the era. Some of the posters associated champagne with sports and leisure activities of the very wealthy, like hunting, horse racing, and rowing. Others linked champagne to love, excitement, and revelry, and still others demonstrated lineage as well as associations with aristocracy and royalty in the very name of the vintage (Phillips 2000: 243–4). Champagne, too, became the lifeblood of bordellos and music halls in France. The famous Moulin Rouge, for example, sold 14,795 bottles of champagne in 1905 alone, employing 796 dancers to facilitate the flow of bubbly (Ehmer et al. 2015: 198–200). Perhaps the embodiment of the extravagance and luxury that characterized the Belle Epoche, ­champagne epitomized the era.

1914–33 The period that encompassed the First World War, Prohibition, and the worldwide depression significantly interrupted the beer, spirits, and wine businesses. The shortages of grain as well as manpower during the war forced breweries to slow or sometimes halt their production, while spirits industries redirected their distilled alcohol to wartime use. Markets for all three kinds of products fell, and in the case of wine, some vineyards were occupied by German soldiers, or shelled and poisoned by mustard gas, which led to a halt in production and long-term devastation for some vineyards. On the heels of the First World War, American Prohibition put many US breweries out of business, and seriously affected European and Canadian breweries as well. It shifted the distilled spirits business from a legal to an illegal enterprise in the United States and parts of Canada, which led to the takeover of the industry by a host of infamous mobsters. The vineyards of the nascent California wine industry benefitted from the law, as the demand for grapes escalated because millions of households turned to homemade winemaking. French and other European wineries spent this period recovering from the phylloxera epidemic and attempting to weather an outbreak of adulterated and outright fraudulent wine. The entire period was one of disorder, dislocation, and even chaos, which did not begin to change until the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in the United States in 1933. The First World War disrupted the brewing industry. A shortage of ingredients, workers, materials, draught animals, and vehicles led to decreased production and an increase in prices in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Production in Europe decreased by about 70 percent during the war, especially in the occupied areas of Belgium and France (Poelmans and Swinnen 2011: 17–18). Many US brewers experienced boycotts, as many breweries had been founded or were owned by German immigrants, and anything remotely related to Germany suffered a severe backlash (Patterson and Swinnen 2014: 35). Outside of the United States, in Ireland, Guinness continued with reduced production while tangentially joining in the allied effort. Already well known for progressive benefits for their workers, Guinness solidified this image by guaranteeing each worker who was called up for service a job upon his return. Furthermore, the company pledged to provide each

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family of a serviceman half of his salary while he was away. The brewery lost more than 500 workers to the army—nearly 20 percent of its workforce—but remained in operation (Mansfield 2009: 210). The war ended, only to be replaced by another interruption in business. Prohibition in the United States and parts of Canada landed another devastating blow to the brewing industry. Not all brewing ceased in the United States, as some brewers could legally produce near beer, malted milk, malt syrups, root beer, and fruit-based soft drinks. These products did keep some breweries afloat during the period (Patterson and Swinnen 2014: 38). Adolph Coors Brewing Company, for example, manufactured these food products and expanded its porcelain business, which continues today (Fahey and Miller 2013: 212). Other breweries went underground. Despite its illegality, they continued to brew beer under the protection of corrupt politicians or government agents, and criminal gangs. One estimate put the profits in Chicago alone at 1,150 percent. Overall, though, Prohibition led to an estimated $300,000,000 loss in property value alone for brewers. Hundreds of brewers closed their doors, thousands of brewery workers lost their jobs, barley farmers and hop growers lost their markets, and the numerous other industries providing support for the trade had to lay off workers (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 193–5). Many breweries had already been forced to shut down during the war, and with Prohibition coming in its wake, by 1933 when the law was repealed, they no longer had the capital to complete the mechanized upgrades needed in an increasingly competitive business (Poelmans and Swinnen 2011: 22). Even many breweries that had been successful could not come back after the thirteen-year hiatus. The Christian Moerlein Brewing Company of Cincinnati, for example, the largest brewery in the state of Ohio in 1900, could not reopen after 1933 (Fahey and Miller 2013: 461). These permanent closures fed the trend of concentrating breweries into larger and fewer businesses. In 1915, in the United States, for example, 1,345 breweries actively made and sold beer; by 1934, a year after the end of prohibition, only a few over 600 were back in business (Poelman and Swinnen 2011: 24). Canada, too, enacted Prohibition during this period, although provincially, and its enforcement was uneven, which meant less disruption in overall production. Moreover, Canada’s prohibition laws did not outlaw the export of beer, which helped brewers such as Molson, by opening up a wide market in the United States for their product (Eberts 2007). Breweries in Europe were less affected by Prohibition, but toward the end of this period the 1929 world economic crisis—that eventually helped end Prohibition in the United States—led to significant hardships for breweries all over Europe. British brewery sales dropped by 20 percent and, between 1927 and 1932, Guinness sales dropped by 50 percent (Mansfield 2009: 229). Distillers similarly made large adjustments as a result of the First World War and Prohibition, and vodka distillers within Russia had to adjust to the watershed brought on by the Bolshevik revolution. The Czarist state had had a monopoly on liquor stores, but the Bolshevik state declared war on vodka, enacted Prohibition, and all exports collapsed. Prohibition in Russia ended in 1925, but the Smirnov distillery, along with the rest of the alcohol industry, now fell firmly under the control of the Soviet state (Matus 2014: 20). In the United States, Prohibition, far from closing down distilling, merely allowed bootleggers to accrue incredible wealth. An estimated 900,000 cases of liquor were shipped to US cities during Prohibition, and Americans spent upwards of $36 million on illegal alcohol during that period (Ehmer et al. 2015: 75–6).

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One famous bootlegger, George Remus of Cincinnati, ingeniously set up an elaborate system that included purchasing a distillery licensed to manufacture whiskey for medicinal purposes, buying a pharmaceutical company licensed to sell medicinal whiskey, and then buying a warehouse containing stored whiskey, which had been produced legally prior to Prohibition. He had all three legs of the stool to make legitimate income, but his profits came from his manipulation of the system. Shipments from his warehouse to his pharmaceutical company were often “lost,” and ended up in an off-the-books warehouse, where they were reshipped out to bootleggers over a five-state area. He ended up supplying a good deal of the East Coast, as he reputedly sold high-quality liquor. Remus’s accumulated wealth once stood at an estimated $50 million (Burns 2004: 206). Remus was just one of the famous bootleggers of the era. The trade fueled the growth of organized crime in the United States, which became increasingly violent as competition among bootleggers heated up. It seemed to come to a crisis point with the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago where on February 14 seven men from a rival gang were very publicly gunned down over a turf battle with the gang of Al Capone. This escalating violence helped lead to the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Perhaps even more influential was the onset of the 1929 depression, which led the government to consider lucrative alcohol tax revenues as a way of pulling the country toward an economic recovery (Phillips 2014: 268). Bootleggers flourished in Prohibition-era America, but alcohol venues grew as well. Prohibition gave rise to one of the most popular kinds of social clubs in the early twentieth century, speakeasies. Estimates placed the number at 32,000 in New York City alone, nearly double that of pre-Prohibition pubs, taverns, and clubs. While there were clubs of all kinds, including tiny hovels and filthy dives, several speakeasies were quite elegant. Replete with thick carpets, guilt-edged mirrors, chandeliers, frescoed ceilings, and sculptures, many had cover charges and live entertainment, and some made their owners incredibly wealthy. Fortune magazine reported that the more successful speakeasies made up to $500,000 a year. With all this opulence on the inside, though, most speakeasies were non-descript, sometimes to the point of dilapidation, on the outside. So as not to draw attention to the establishment, would-be customers had to knock on the correct door, wait for someone to appear at a peep-hole, and give either the code word or the name of a regular in order to be allowed to enter. While this rigmarole might have deterred some, the ritual held a particular cachet for many others. It simply added to an air of exclusivity, which made the nightclubs exceedingly popular, according to a New York owner of several speakeasies, Barney Gallant (Burns 2004: 199–201). Whisky distilleries on the Canadian side of the border made extraordinary profits during Prohibition. Many had started in the nineteenth century, but companies like Hiram Walker and Joseph Seagram became big brands with the help of US Prohibition (Kosar 2010: 105). The 1920s also saw a lively trade in spirits in Europe, through increasingly famous venues where well-known expat Americans, along with European literati, met to drink and be seen. One of the most famous was the New York Bar in Paris, which boasted such clientele as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Noel Coward, Sinclair Lewis, Jack Dempsey, George Gershwin, and Ernest Hemingway. Jumping on the bandwagon of the increasingly popular cocktail, the bar famously invented the Bloody Mary, Sidecar, White Lady, and French 75 (Ehmer et al. 2015: 207).

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The 1914–33 period brought unexpected change to the wine industry as well. During the First World War wineries in Languedoc were called upon to distribute 200,000 hectoliters of wine to military hospitals to boost the morale of wounded soldiers, and the Ministry of War rerouted wine to soldiers regularly. Soldiers were requisitioned ¼ liter per day in 1914, which was later raised to ½ liter per day, and then ¾ liter per day by 1918. In all, French soldiers at the front consumed 12 million hectoliters in one year toward the end of the war. Winemakers made money by providing for the troops while supplies lasted. The regions of Bordeaux and Burgundy, though, lost money, as the government only paid a pre-set average price for wine, which was below the normal amount for finer wine. Virtually all the wine distributed to the troops was red, as red wine was seen as a masculine drink, more likely to “put fire into the soldiers’ blood and breathe courage into their hearts” (Phillips 2000: 293–5). Wine shortages soon occurred during the war as production decreased from a lack of labor and materials. Even though not all men were drafted into service, labor was funneled into other sectors deemed necessary for war support (Phillips 2000: 296). One of the worst affected areas during the First World War was the region of Champagne. The 1914 vintage happened to be one of the largest in recent history, and as men were being called up to service, women, children, and the elderly took on the responsibility for the harvest. That year vineyards produced 60 million hectoliters, almost 50 percent more than in 1913, and the next year, 1915, almost repeated the bounty of 1914. Several battles took place in the region, and Germans dug trenches throughout the vineyards, making these two harvests become the famous “blood vintages” in France, as twenty women and children lost their lives gathering grapes in these two years. Moreover, Germans bombed Reims, an area in Champagne, for 1,051 days during the war. The town was evacuated, and the tunnels of the champagne cellars below the city became home to over 20,000 people who lived there for over three years (Clarke 2015: 1621). In fact, it was a veritable town below ground, with businesses, schools, and churches. Aboveground, by the armistice in November of 1918, the region of Champagne had lost 50 percent of its population, 40 percent of its vineyards, and of those vines left, many had been poisoned by gas (Lukacs 2012: 193). Germany lost up to 75,000 hectares of wine-growing regions as a result of the war, in part because they lost Alsace to France, but also because the post-war inflation in Germany in the 1920s reduced the number of customers for German wines. Moreover, the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to import 260,000 hectoliters of French wine each year without tariffs. Spain and Portugal were much less affected by the war, however, and thus were able to continue to export wines throughout the period (Philips 2000: 296–8). The French rebuilt their vineyards in the 1920s, and by 1924 there were an additional 50,000 hectares of vines, mainly in the south. Per capita wine consumption in France grew in this period to 136 liters per year, up 25 percent from 1904. In the United States, though Prohibition halted commercial wine production, California grape growers’ output increased, as demand skyrocketed, not for wine, but for juice concentrate or dehydrated grape “bricks.” People were instructed in the art of how not to make wine in their homes, while at the same time flavorings such as port, sherry, claret, and riesling were sold in casks that could be easily fermented at home. To make the process even more convenient, home delivery was available in many cities (Phillips 2000: 298, 303).

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1933–50 The post-Prohibition years brought back the trend of rapid consolidation in the beer and spirits industries, and as mass media developed at breakneck speed with the proliferation of the radio and then television, advertising thrived. The alcohol industry was one of the first to embrace new strategies, and advertising came to dominate the way the alcohol industry did business. Toward the end of the period, the Second World War affected the industries much the same way as had the First World War, with shortages of materials and manpower, but there were much less stringent restrictions imposed, and the industries quickly regained their stature after the war, as television became more and more commonplace, providing a lucrative medium in which to sell alcohol. The beer industry in the post-Prohibition years was characterized by continued technological development, continued conglomeration, and an explosion of advertising through radio and television. These changes were interrupted during the Second World War with resource and manpower shortages, and a good deal of the beer that was produced was directed to the troops (Fahey and Miller 2013: 212). The beginning of the period, though, witnessed one of the most important technological advances to affect the beer industry in this period: the proliferation of refrigerators into individual households. In 1921, only 5,000 refrigerators were manufactured; by 1929, that number had risen to 890,000, and by 1935, to 1,882,000. This took away one of the side-businesses of brewers, though, which was selling ice; but it also meant that people could buy more bottled beer as they could keep it at home in their refrigerators, and drink it at their leisure. The packaging of beer changed, too. Beer began to be sold in cans. The idea of canning beer had been around since the first decade of the twentieth century, but did not become practical until the 1930s when the American Can Co. developed “keg lined” cans, which had a coating on the inside of the can to prevent leaching. Soon vinyl became the common material coating the inside of beer cans, and by the end of 1935, 18 of the 750 breweries in operation in the United States were canning beer (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 199–200). During the 1930s and 1940s beer companies in many countries continued the decades-long pattern of consolidation. In Canada in the early 1930s, E. P. Taylor created his Brewing Corporation of Canada when he merged his Brading Breweries Ltd, an Ottawa company, with Capital Brewing of Ottawa; Kuntz Brewery of Waterloo, Ontario; The British American Brewing Company of Windsor, Ontario; Carling Brewing Co. of London, Ontario; and O’Keefe Brewery of Toronto. He continued to acquire roughly thirty more Canadian breweries and changed the name of his company to the Brewing Corporation of Canada, and then to Canadian Breweries Ltd. (Sneath 2001: 97). In Britain, consolidation meant that the 11,752 breweries that had existed in 1903–4 had been whittled down to 567 by 1949–50 (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 142). The US beer industry, too, became controlled by fewer and fewer companies. Many of the small breweries in the United States had gone out of business during Prohibition and did not reopen afterwards (Poelmans and Swinnen 2011: 23), so by 1940, while beer production had reached pre-Prohibition levels, it was brewed by half as many companies (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 201). Two main paths to consolidation characterized the American brewing industry after Prohibition. Either companies built regional breweries that brewed their national brands, as was the case for

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Figure 4.5  Canning process at the Acton factory, 1937. “Fifty Pints Please! 3rd December 1937: A new innovation—canned beer—is rapidly becoming very popular. Here at the Acton factory of a well known brewer the canning process is well under way to satisfy an order for 250,000 cans.” Photograph by Fox Photos/Stringer/Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

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Anheuser-Busch, or they bought regional breweries and those breweries continued to sell under their original names (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 202). Consolidation was driven in part by the widespread growth of television, and the a ­ bility of the bigger brands to advertise nationally (George 2011: 225). Advertising became the hallmark of the beer industry. The large brewers took advantage of all possible media strategies to sell their product. For a while in the 1930s breweries latched onto a health conscious theme in advertising. In 1936, Schlitz Brewing of Milwaukee launched a campaign that hailed its Schlitz “Vitamin D Beer” as “one of the Greatest Brewing Achievements of All Time.” Other brewers jumped on the bandwagon. In 1937 Auto City Brewing of Detroit claimed that their beer contained vitamins B and C, and Acme beer in California called their beer “Dietically Non-Fattening.” The Federal Alcohol Administration stopped these kinds of advertising claims in 1940 when they ruled that beer companies could no longer mention vitamins on their packaging. Other breweries used less controversial methods. In the late 1930s, for example, Hamms brewery, in St. Paul, Minnesota, sponsored a radio music show (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 205–6). Breweries strove to give their beer brands particular images in advertising that would entice potential customers. In general, beer advertising honored male physical labor, machismo, and male group bonding. Many commercials demonstrated how beer could smooth acceptance into a group, where men “swapped stories, joked, bragged and [swapped] good-natured insults.” Beer was also tied to sports, outdoor activities, a middleclass lifestyle, and a frontier mentality. Examples of these kinds of advertisements include a 1940 Budweiser image that showed “a white picket fence, frisky dog, two exemplary children, a devoted wife and a cold bottle of beer, all awaiting the breadwinner about to emerge from the metropolitan bus” (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 204–5). The Second World War interrupted the growth of advertising, and interrupted the beer industry as well. The US government mandated in 1943 that brewers allocate 15 percent of their beer for the armed forces, which actually helped the industry, as the exposure of millions of servicemen to national brands inspired loyalty to those brands after the war (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 202). There were fewer raw materials in general and those that were available for beer were of poor quality. This, along with grain shortages, led to lighter beers, which interestingly began to shift beer drinkers’ preferences, leading to the popularity of lighter beers in the post-war world. Production declined in Europe during the war years, too, as raw materials were strictly rationed. Breweries turned to substitute ingredients such as beets, and flavoring substitutes such as coriander seed, chamomile blossom, skins of lemons and oranges. Other supplies such as metal and cork became less and less available. Many European breweries located in the occupied territories suffered substantial damage to their plants, requiring significant investment in new materials after the war, which drove companies to consolidate in order to pool resources (Poelmans and Swinnen 2011: 16, 22). In Ireland, Guinness once again took the opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism in wartime, this time by providing free Guinness to military hospitals, shipping beer to men at the front, and serving it at a discount to all men in uniform at home. The company also willingly set aside 5 percent of its production for the troops at the request of the British army. In one of their most memorable gestures during the Second World War, Guinness promised that each man at the front would have a Guinness with his Christmas dinner in 1939. To fulfill this colossal undertaking, especially in the face of a war-depleted workforce, retired

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Figure 4.6  Schlitz Beer advertisement from Harper’s Magazine, 1904. Image by Bettman via Getty Images.

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Guinness workers eagerly came back to work, Red Cross workers volunteered, First World War veterans joined the effort, and in a show of remarkable solidarity workers from competing breweries volunteered their time. The order was fulfilled (Mansfield 2009: 235). Normal beer advertising commenced again after its hiatus during the war years. Pabst Brewing Co. of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, advertised on the radio, sponsoring ads during the Groucho Marx show and sponsoring the weekly Eddie Cantor show in 1948. It was the only coast-to-coast network show sponsored by a brewer (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 205). By the end of 1948, though, there were seventy-one television stations in fortytwo cities across the United States, with people clamoring to own their own televisions, and by 1960, television ownership was a reality for over 90 percent of American households. Beer advertising was there on the ground floor and became ubiquitous in early television. In 1949, Pabst sponsored “The Life of Riley” which was carried on both radio and television, and in 1951 they became the first brewery to sponsor a color television show (Wilson and Gourvish 1998: 206). Television advertising, beginning particularly in the 1950s, intensified the trend toward the domination of a few national breweries. For example, the number of breweries in the United States dropped from 468 in 1945 to 292 in 1955. Overall production increased only slightly in the 1950s from 86.6 million barrels to 89.8 million barrels, as demand was relatively fixed during this period and did not begin to rise until the 1960s. The dramatic changes wrought by advertising and economies of scale, though, transformed the market structure over the next three decades. The top five breweries increased their market share from 19 percent in 1947 to 75 percent by 1980. The change was partly led by advertising ability. For example, in 1965 breweries producing over 500,000 barrels a year were able to spend $2.07 per barrel on advertising, yet those producing less than 100,000 were only able to spend 98 cents (Horowitz 1967: 11–12). Moreover, consumption habits changed. Before Prohibition most people bought their beers from local or regional breweries, and most beer was sold from casks in saloons. Packaged sales of beer rose from 30 percent of the market in 1930 to 72 percent of the market by 1950 (Stack 2003). Sports broadcasting became the most popular arena for beer commercials. Narragansett Brewery in Cranston, Rhode Island, one of the biggest New England breweries at that time, began sponsoring the Boston Red Sox telecasts in 1945. Goebel Brewery of Detroit sponsored Detroit Tigers’ baseball games. These 1940s commercials were not viewed at home, since few households owned their own television set. These sponsorships were within reach of regional breweries at the time, as in 1948 a full hour of television time in New York cost only $1,200, in Chicago, $700, and in Detroit, $400, while brief commercials cost a meager $10 (George 2011: 213–16). The post-Prohibition era brought change to the spirits industry as well. Many whiskey distilleries consolidated during this period, while all companies jumped onto the advertising bandwagon. And though these trends continued throughout the period, the Second World War interrupted the flow, diverting all production to industrial alcohol for use in the machinery of war. In the first year after Prohibition ended, three kinds of distilling companies emerged: those that had some distilled liquor on hand because they had been granted licenses for medical alcohol during Prohibition; companies that had been forced to close, but who had been able to hold on to their brands, allowing them to maintain name recognition;

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and start-ups, new companies that began to build themselves from the ground up after Prohibition (Veach 2013: 1048). Many of all three kinds of companies failed, leading to consolidations that created four giant companies, known as the “Big Four.” These North American distilleries included Schenley Distilleries and National Distillers, the two largest American companies, and Seagram’s and Hiram Walker, the two largest Canadian companies (Veach 1068). National Distillers owned the most famous brands such as Old Crow and Old Taylor bourbons and Old Overholt and Mount Vernon rye whiskeys. Seagram’s, a company that focused on blended whisky, sold Crown Royal Canadian whisky and Seven Crown American blended whiskey. Hiram Walker owned Canadian Club, as well as pre-packaged cocktails (Veach 2013: 1070). These four companies dominated the market, demonstrated by the fact that in 1933 there had been 130 distilleries, but by 1958 that number had dwindled to 76, with the “Big Four” controlling more than 75 percent of the market. The two Canadian companies built distilleries in the United States to expand their markets even more. Hiram Walker (Canadian Club) built a large distillery in Peoria, which increased the company’s stock value by 2,700 percent, and Seagram’s, which became the biggest distiller in the world, also built a plant in the United States. These “Big Four” took advantage of their ability to advertise, regularly ranked in the top ten of America’s advertisers. In addition, to ensure needed political support for their industry, they also created a new lobbying organization, the Distilled Spirits Institute (Mitenbuler 2015: 198, 211, 219–20). In contrast to the Big Four, a few new start-up distilleries came on the scene after 1933, and some became quite successful. One of the most successful was Heaven Hill distillery in Kentucky started by the Shapira brothers. The five brothers had no whiskey experience, but they had owned department stores and were successful businessmen. They smartly hired Harry Beam and his son Joe, relatives of the famous Jim Beam whiskey family, to run the distillery. Heaven Hill had its own brands, but it also sold bulk whiskey, especially to liquor stores that wanted to put their own name on the product. It sold extra whiskey to other distillers when they needed it, and acquired brands from companies going out of business or brands that companies no longer wanted (Veach 2013: 1093). The onset of the Second World War shelved these trends, but did not devastate the industry. Rather, it diverted it. During the war, governments enlisted distilleries to produce as much industrial alcohol as possible. The War Production Board in the United States took over control of the industry after Pearl Harbor, and converted virtually all distilleries to industrial production, in other words, 190-proof alcohol. The distilling industry produced 44 percent of the over 1.7 billion gallons of industrial alcohol used during the war. Industrial alcohol made “antifreeze, tetraethyl lead, which was mixed with gasoline as an octane booster, plastics for aviation, lacquer to protect metal from rust, insecticide, and medical supplies.” Much of the alcohol also produced “synthetic rubber for tires, hoses, and waterproofing” (Veach 2013: 1121). War needs bred technological innovation in the industry, and Louis Rosensteil, president of Schenley Distilling Co., directed his engineers to develop a modified column still that could make high-proof alcohol less expensively. He then provided the plans to all other distillers at no cost. Rosensteil continued his support of the war effort by instructing his company’s chemists to make penicillin, not only for the military, but also for civilian use. His chemists did not have to stretch their expertise very far, though, as the process for growing the molds for penicillin was similar to that of yeast for beer (Veach 2013: 1130).

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The end of the war brought a return to advertising, and the necessity of companies to solidify their images in the eyes of the public. An executive at the large corporation, Schenley, argued that the industry needed an “increased accent upon the quality appeal in liquor merchandising,” while another distillery marketer urged his sales force to focus on luxury. Companies tried to sell heritage and history as well (Mitenbuler 2015: 204–5). Advertising also attempted to convince homemakers that whiskey was crucial when hosting a party or a dinner, transforming it into a household staple (Phillips 2014: 300). By employing the newfound popularity of mixed drinks, marketers were able to successfully boost the sales of Irish whiskey in the 1940s through advertising the drink, Irish coffee (Kosar 2010: 83). Sales of US whiskey began to rise as well in the 1940s and 1950s, hitting their peak during the 1950s. In 1940 there were 99 million gallons of whiskey bottled for consumption and by 1960 the number had reached 147 million gallons, an increase of almost 68 percent (Statistical Abstracts 1965: 797). Advertising aided the trend of consolidation that began in earnest after Prohibition. Seventy-five percent of the market in the 1950s was controlled by the top four conglomerates (Mitenbuler 2015: 204). As the American market declined in the 1960s, American distilleries began to market their products internationally, especially following American servicemen to US military bases across the world (Veach 2013: 1182). International marketing helped replace some of the sales of whiskey lost in the United States. The decade between 1960 and 1970 saw an increase of US whisky produced and bottled for consumption from 147 million gallons to 192 gallons, an increase of close to 25 percent (Statistical Abstracts 1979: 815). By middle of the twentieth century, whiskey no longer held the virtual monopoly on spirits in the United States, as tequila, rum, and vodka began to catch on with the general public. For example, Bacardi sales tripled between 1941 and 1945 (Mitenbuler 2015: 217) and the Second World War directly stimulated an, albeit temporary, explosion of tequila exports from Mexico to the United States and Europe, rising from 21,621 liters in 1940 to 4.5 million liters in 1944 (Gaytán 2014: 65). The creation of several vodka-based cocktails became a successful marketing tool to promote the liquor. John Martin, of Heublein Spirits Co., famously traveled around the United States promoting the company’s Smirnoff vodka. At the Cock n Bull, a British pub on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles owned by Jack Morgan, Morgan and Heublein’s Martin together created a new fad. Morgan, ever the promoter himself, was trying to foster demand for his ginger beer; Martin suggested he mix it with Smirnoff and lime and, voilá, it became the Moscow Mule. Martin, traveling from bar to bar, took two Polaroid pictures of each bartender making a Moscow Mule. He would leave one with the bartender, and take the other one with him so that he could show each bartender that “all the popular bars” were serving Moscow Mules (Matus 2014: 33). With its own specifically designed copper mug, Heublein distributed posters of the drink held by Hollywood favorites such as Woody Allen and Groucho Marx (Ehmer et al. 2015: 38). Vodka’s popularity in Hollywood led to its success across the country, as people strove to identify with well-known celebrities by buying a little celebrity themselves. Furthering vodka’s popularity, a perhaps apocryphal story circulated in 1947 that Joan Crawford had thrown an exclusive Hollywood party, and served only vodka and champagne (Ehmer et al. 2015: 36). Furthermore, it was rumored that actors preferred vodka on set because it did not leave the breath smelling of alcohol. In somewhat of a play on words, one of the

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successful marketing campaigns urged Americans to drink vodka, as “It leaves you breathless” (Matus 2014: 33). Advertising helped vodka increase its market share across the United States. In 1950, 40,000 cases of vodka were sold and by 1956 that number had risen to 4.4 million cases (Ehmer 2015: 40). The wine industry followed a somewhat different path during the post-Prohibition years. In the 1930s, the French wine industry was still suffering from the fallout of the phylloxera epidemic of the late nineteenth century, the shortages of the First World War, and the depression. These events had led to unscrupulous wine traders pawning off either adulterated or cheap wine, or wine made from any of a number of things except grapes, as fine wine. Wineries, especially those in regions known for fine wine, had been pressuring the government for several years to regulate labeling, and there had been some changes, like the appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) or “controlled designation of origin” which in 1908 had established the broad regions for Champagne, Cognac, Bordeaux, Banyuls, and Armagnac (Phillips 2000: 292). Real change, though, did not come until 1935 with the creation of the Comité National des appellations d’origine (CNAO), a national committee made up of government agents as well as representatives from the winegrowers, which set down rules for the varieties of grapes that could be used in particular wines, the ratios of different grapes in varieties, the minimum alcohol levels in wine, and the maximum yields of wine per hectare of vines (Phillips 2014: 290). US wines began their rise in the 1930s as well. While many vineyards had been planted in the late nineteenth century, most wines had been sold in bulk, and California had not earned a reputation for producing fine wine. Yet one winery, Beaulieu, owned by Georges de Latour, set out to change the status of California wines. Although it sold in bulk, the winery kept small batches of Cabernet Sauvignon back each year, and wanted to build on those reserve vintages. To that end, the winery hired Russian emigre Andre Tchelistcheff as winemaker in 1938. To produce fine wine, Tchelistcheff decided the winery should focus on Cabernet, as well as make substantial changes in hygiene during the production process. While Tchelistcheff strove to produce fine wines, he also wanted the entire Napa Valley to become a region known for quality wine. In 1947, he started the Napa Valley Wine Technical Group, which gave advice to over eighty wineries in the region, working to raise expertise in every winery in the area (Clarke 2015: 1885, 1888). Even with the improvements in France and the United States, wine continued to lose consumers. Prohibition’s speakeasies had triggered a rise in the popularity of the cocktail. Now, rather than wine carrying a mark of sophistication as it had in the nineteenth century, cocktails were in vogue. In the 1930s, cocktail parties became fashionable, as well as the before dinner drink, or the cocktail hour. Mixed drinks such as Daiquiris, White Ladies, and especially Martinis became the drinks of choice in clubs, especially in response to a customer base that for the first time included women. Many cocktails became known as “ladies’ drinks” in the new drinking culture (Lukacs 2012: 197). While wine may have languished, conversely, champagne solidified its own niche in the market. Carrying its image from the nineteenth century, champagne continued to represent glamour. Hollywood stars did their part to popularize champagne through their own extravagant displays. Marilyn Monroe, for example, purportedly ordered 150 bottles at a time so she could bathe in it. She claimed that she went to bed every night with Chanel No 5 behind each ear and woke up every morning with a glass of Piper-Heidsieck champagne (Clarke 2015: 1602).

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Conclusion The era known as the industrial age, lasting from the mid-nineteenth century to just past the end of the Second World War, brought dramatic social, economic, and political upheavals resulting from what was nothing less than an economic revolution. The alcohol industry experienced the upheavals, but also embraced changes that modernized the industries in dramatic ways. In the first era, innovation transformed all three trades as science came to play a larger role in the alcohol production process in the nineteenth century. Technological and transportation advancements allowed for wider markets for all three industries as well. Later, in the First World War and 1920s period, war disrupted all the industries, and although Prohibition was centered in the United States and parts of Canada, it certainly affected the alcohol industries in other countries. The regular lines of export were closed off, yet smuggling was alive and well, primarily for spirits, leaving some producers with extraordinary profits. The post-Prohibition period was distinguished by the domination of mass media, leading the alcohol industry to heavily rely on radio and then television to advertise their products and grow their markets. The Second World War caused a blip in this trend, but the post-war years quickly resumed the pattern of consolidation and the centrality of advertising to business success. Throughout the entire hundred-year period, some long-term trends carried over from period to period. The effects of scientific and mechanical innovations, increasing consolidation of businesses, and increased dependence upon advertising characterized all three markets. These trends continued into the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.

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5

MEDICINE AND HEALTH SARAH W. TRACY

Introduction: No Neutral Spirit Reflecting on the history of alcohol and its perceived effects, Berton Roueché, the mid-twentieth-century medical writer for The New Yorker, observed that “The popular mythology of alcohol is a vast and vehement book … As a compendium of ageless error, of phantom fears and ghostlier reassurances, it probably has no equal. It is perhaps, the classic text in the illiterature of medicine” (1960: 47). For Roueché, alcohol was a “neutral spirit,” a tabula rasa on which “Wets” and “Drys,” or the friends and foes of ethanol, had projected their cultural prejudices, personal preferences, religious aspirations, and ethical concerns for millenia. No other beverage possessed such a diverse array of attributes— most of them, to Roueché’s mind, pure rubbish. The situation was all the more baffling, he added, because since the late nineteenth century, physiologists, biochemists, and physicians had pretty well solved the puzzle of alcohol’s nature and its effects on human health. It is unlikely that any century-long period experienced as much diversity of opinion about alcohol as the years between 1850 and 1950, the age of industry, empire, and war. It is equally difficult to imagine that any other one-hundred-year period witnessed as much change in medical practice or in the Western world’s understanding of human health and disease. Medical knowledge and knowledge about alcohol’s effects on human health evolved simultaneously, affecting each other throughout the century. In 1860, a time when hospitals such as Massachusetts General in Boston relied heavily on brandy and wine as stimulating therapies, prominent Harvard physician and literary light Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed his own doubts about doctors’ therapeutic arsenal. Holmes declared that with the exception of “opium, which the Creator himself seems to prescribe,” and “wine, which is a food, and the vapors which produce the miracle of anesthesia … I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, (emphasis original) could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes” (1861: 38–9). Yet as time marched on, fewer and fewer would agree with Holmes. Wonder drugs such as aspirin (1899), insulin (1922), antibiotics (1942), and cortisone (1949) were added to the modern pharmacopoeia, transforming the profession, its practices, and its public image. These and other new and effective medicines helped remove alcohol from its position as a therapeutic mainstay in the United States, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Europe. The relationship between alcohol and health also involved the problem of chronic drunkenness or intemperance, of course. And the cast of characters addressing the negative effects of alcohol consumption hailed from many nations. Briton Thomas Trotter (1804) and signer of the US Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush (1784) were among the first physicians to interpret habitual drunkenness as a disease at the dawn of the nineteenth

century, but Swedish physician Magnus Huss introduced the term “alcoholism” to the medical world in 1849 in his Alcoholismus Chronicus, or Chronic Alcoholic Illness. A Contribution to the Study of Dyscrasias Based on My Personal Experience and the Experience of Others (1849). The American Association for the Cure of Inebriates was established in New York City in 1870. By the end of the nineteenth century, the disease concepts of alcoholic inebriety, dipsomania, and alcoholism—in rough succession—had achieved currency across the majority of the Western world and in both hemispheres. The effects of chronic heavy drinking were well recognized as part of a larger constellation of addictions—to opiates, tobacco, cocaine, even lettuce—that fell under the global term “inebriety,” much like today’s “dopamine hypothesis” offers a unifying framework for addiction. Homes, asylums, and hospitals—public and private—for the treatment of alcoholic and drug inebriates opened across the United States, Europe, and Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and earliest decades of the twentieth. Patent medicine cures also offered solace to those afflicted by drink. Leslie E. Keeley’s famed Bi-Chloride of Gold cure and his proprietary institutes treated inebriates throughout North America and across the world, extending into Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Australia during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The original Keeley Institute in Dwight, Illinois, did not close its doors until 1966 (Tracy 2005: 81–91, 114–21). With the enactment of Prohibition in the United States in 1920, terms such as “inebriety” and “dipsomania” were relegated to a diagnostic dustbin, only to re-emerge post-Repeal in 1933 as the modern disease concept of alcoholism. The alcohol and brewing industries did their best to sever the historic ties between ethanol in its many forms and the Prohibition Era image of “Demon Rum.” And the medical profession—especially in North America and Great Britain—played its part by developing an understanding of alcoholism as a disease to which only certain individuals were susceptible, by dint of circumstance, personality, or heredity. In short, between 1850 and 1950 popular knowledge about alcohol was transformed to meet the needs of a range of competing parties, whether drinkers or teetotalers. Temperance advocates, reform-minded physicians, politicians, and the imbibing masses likewise viewed alcohol’s nature in response to social and technical change: the growth of cities, the flow of beer swilling and whiskey drinking immigrants, medicine’s expanding therapeutics, women’s suffrage, and the industrial and transportation revolutions all affected the identity of alcohol and those who drank. Images of alcohol evolved, as did the perceived utility and costs associated with it, within the modernizing Western world.

Alcohol Therapeutics: From Nourishment to Nihilism Despite an active temperance movement in Britain and the United States—indeed, the temperance movement constituted the largest social reform movement of nineteenth-­ century North America—both nations relied greatly on alcohol to address the needs of the sick. At mid-century medicinal alcohol’s popularity reached its height. Changes in physiological thinking about disease—as an asthenic (weakened) rather than a sthenic (over stimulated) state—meant that physicians began to rely on bolstering or stimulating treatments. Gone were the days of dramatically depleting therapies such as bleeding, cupping, and calomel, a mercury-based purgative. Instead, physicians turned to substances they believed nourished and strengthened the constitution. “Alcohol most vividly embodied the

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ethos of heroic ­stimulation,” observed historian John Harley Warner. Used in approximately 40 percent of cases at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the early 1850s, alcohol continued to be administered by hospital physicians to a quarter of their patients as late as the 1880s (1997: 144–5). Prescribing alcohol was not new at mid-century; rather the frequency with which it was used and the forms of alcohol employed changed from earlier in the century. In the 1820s and 1830s, alcohol was administered mostly as wine whey, a milky mixture that resembled custard and was low in alcohol content. As much food as drink, wine whey was what Warner terms a “supportive nutrient,” but it was not a stimulating therapy (1997: 144–5). By the 1850s, however, physicians had begun to prescribe whiskey, wine, and brandy by themselves. At the Massachusetts General Hospital, patients with conditions such as pneumonia and typhoid fever received frequent and large doses, sometimes adding up to eight or more ounces of pure alcohol per day; ethanol in several forms became a mainstay of clinical therapeutics. Nor was the situation much different in Britain and France, where in the “mid-nineteenth century the idea that alcohol was a force-giving food, stimulant and necessary part of a proper diet was firmly entrenched” (Warner 1980: 237). Irish-born physician Robert Bentley Todd (1809–60) was likely the most zealous champion of alcoholic therapeutics. Todd maintained that only natural processes healed the body of its ailments. Thus, supportive, nourishing therapy to strengthen the body while it healed itself was valuable, and Todd considered alcohol among the physician’s most precious therapeutic allies. Here Todd drew on the work of the German physiologist Justus von Liebig, who considered alcohol’s ability to fuel respiration and generate animal heat unsurpassed. Liebig recommended alcohol to prevent the ailing body from converting its own healthy tissue into the nourishment necessary for healing (Warner 1980: 241–2). Indeed, British physician, physiologist, and temperance sympathizer Benjamin Ward Richardson laid blame for alcohol’s therapeutic popularity squarely on Todd’s shoulders, declaring “The teachings of Dr. Todd led many practitioners to ‘rely,’ as they expressed it, on alcohol, to the exclusion, in some instances, of all other active treatment” (1876: 6). For temperance enthusiasts, physicians’ dependence upon alcohol was at best misguided and at worst irresponsible and potentially harmful. More trouble arose in the Todd school of therapeutics when French physiologists suggested that rather than being transformed through oxidation, alcohol exited the body largely, if not exclusively unchanged. Its use as food or nourishment was called into question. How could a substance that left the body without alteration have brought about any therapeutic benefit? Yet, remarkably, if the rationale for employing alcohol fell short, its routine use remained little changed. Instead, the European medical community came to regard alcohol in the late 1860s and 1870s as a stimulant of the body’s own vital force, moving away from its Toddian role as nourishment. Alcohol’s use marched on. By the late 1860s, physiological studies had demonstrated that alcohol was both transformed in the body and released intact from the body after ingestion. More interesting to clinicians, however, the same researches revealed something brand new: ingesting alcohol lowered the body’s temperature. Yet a new rationale for prescribing alcohol had been discovered: to combat fevers. Its use as an antipyretic continued through the end of the nineteenth century, when aspirin came on the scene as another means to battle fever and reduce

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Figure 5.1  Gilbert and Parsons “Hygienic Whiskey for Medicinal Use,” advertisement, 1860. Image by Buyenlarge via Getty Images.

pain. Robert Todd’s contributions to alcoholic therapeutics were memorialized within popular culture as the “Hot Toddy,” part cocktail, part home remedy. Europeans and Americans continued to use alcohol as a medicine in a variety of therapeutic contexts, however, even into the new century. Indeed, so popular was alcohol as a stimulant within the German context that in 1896 Magdeburg physician Magnus Hirschfeld

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faced criminal charges for maintaining his patient on what he called a “cold liquid diet,” that involved no ethanol. Hirschfeld’s colleagues protested that a diet of the strongest wines and most nourishing foods was the more responsible therapeutic course. In court, he was charged with “acceleration of death, or homicide by negligence, in not using spirits freely” (Journal of the American Medical Association 1896: 495). It is easy to speculate that Hirschfeld, who was an advocate of naturopathy, and later became a renowned sexologist, left general medical practice because of this lawsuit. Mustering testimony from the German Medical Society and the medical council of Saxony, however, he proved beyond doubt that medical opinion on alcohol therapeutics was changing. Observed Journal of the American Medical Association editors, who reported on the case, “Evidently a great revolution of theories concerning this drug [alcohol] has begun” (1896: 496). Such a therapeutic change of heart may have begun in Germany as the nineteenth century came to a close, but in the United States, physicians continued to use alcohol in several clinical contexts. Evolution rather than revolution might more accurately describe alcohol’s decreasing therapeutic importance. The decline in alcoholic therapeutics was noted by temperance journalist Ernest Cherrington in his 1925 Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem. There he observed that the diminished medicinal alcohol use could be seen in British hospital budgets. The seven largest London hospitals, for example, spent $38,560 on alcohol in 1862, but just $6,190 in 1912 (1925a: 127).1 Outside of Britain, Cherrington claimed, reports from hospitals in Prague, Vienna, and Krakow also indicated that “alcohol, even in the form of wine or beer, was being discarded both from hospital dietaries and from therapeutics, except under special circumstances” (1925b: 127). One may question Cherrington’s word because of his temperance biases, yet physician Richard Cabot reported a similar trend stateside at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Writing in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1909, Cabot reported that at Mass General per capita spending on alcohol (beer, ale, wine, and spirits) had declined from $.46 in 1898 to $.13 in 1907, while expenditures on non-alcoholic medicines had declined by about a third, from $1.68 per person to $.92 per person. The price of neither alcohol nor other medicines had fallen disproportionately, he added. Rather, it seems, doctors were simply prescribing less in general. Cabot attributed the changes to both the medical profession’s realization that alcohol was not a stimulant but a narcotic, and to his colleagues’ recognition that medicines could effectively treat only about six diseases that physicians contended with on a routine basis. In line with these observations, Cabot noted that hydrotherapeutics, massage, mechanical treatment, and psychic therapy had all grown in popularity, while the number of surgeries had remained constant (1909: 480–1). In 1932, a year before the repeal of Prohibition, Columbia University physician and public health leader Haven Emerson published Alcohol and Man—The Effects of Alcohol on Man in Health and Disease, an edited volume intended to set the record straight on the role of ethanol in medicine. Written for an educated lay audience of “school teachers, ministers of the churches, editors and publicists,” Alcohol and Man eschewed any connection with either wet or dry politics. In a chapter on the therapeutic use of alcohol, the authors, all medical and scientific luminaries, considered the use of “whiskey, wine, beer, etc., as a means of treatment,” rather than addressing alcohol’s use as an antiseptic or its common role as a solvent in the preparation of many drugs. It was alcohol as beverage, after all, that

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had a routine, if contested place in modern therapeutics (Emerson 1932: 153). Emerson and his colleagues appreciated that physicians’ prescription of alcohol in these forms was declining, but they deemed more at work than Prohibition-era restrictions. Certain infectious diseases—especially tuberculosis—diabetes, conditions of old age, nephritis, heart disease, and snakebite still warranted consideration of alcoholic therapeutics, but clinical data were emerging that questioned even these indications. In the case of diabetes, alcohol had figured prominently in the early semi-starvation, carbohydrate-restricted diets for diabetes, particularly that of the early diabetologist Frederick Allen. It offered a source of calories not readily metabolized into glucose. Indeed Elliot Joslin had stated in the first edition of his The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus, with Observations Based upon 1000 Cases that in no disease was “the employment of alcohol more useful or more justifiable” (1916: 226). For Joslin, it furnished a palatable form of food in an often disagreeable diet, and allowed those with diabetes to digest fat more readily. Still, the Boston physician rarely prescribed alcohol for his own patients, and in the second edition of his textbook, Joslin observed that alcohol given in any chronic disease such as diabetes ran the risk of habituation, although he felt that it was a small risk (1917: 282–3). Insulin, available commercially by the mid-1920s, made dependence on alcohol as a food unnecessary, while its use as an appetite stimulant or digestive was acceptable, if regarded as inessential (Emerson 1932: 161). By the early 1930s, mounting evidence suggested that alcohol’s simulating properties in small doses were limited. Its actions as a neurological and muscular depressant in moderate to large doses were well recognized, as were its dampening effects on resistance to infection. For these reasons, alcohol became less popular in the treatment of infectious disease. Instead, alcohol’s sedative effects were valued at bedtime, as a medication that might facilitate sleep. Likewise, its vasodilating properties offered a cold patient, particularly one coming in from the frigid outdoors, temporary comfort. And while alcohol was seen in the mid-nineteenth century as a potent stimulant in cases of chronic tuberculosis, by the early twentieth century physicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean recognized the role of strong spirits, and absinthe especially, in the production of the disease in its many forms. The extended nature of treatment for tuberculosis meant that prescribing alcohol in any capacity could lead to dependence on the beverage. The administration of alcohol in old age up through the 1930s was based on its pleasurable effects. Observed Harlow Brooks, a physician at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, “If it be desirable to add to old age, pleasure, geniality, conviviality, pleasant sensations of whatever character, then the aged should have alcohol” (Emerson 1932: 164). For the elderly, alcohol consumption comprised a convivial source of calories, as well as appetite stimulation. It could induce sleep at a time of life when that proved difficult, and its diuretic and diaphoretic properties meant that one’s urinary tract and sweat glands were stimulated to work. But physicians were cautioned to use the same discretion they showed in administering any other drug. Indeed, that was the point. By 1932, there were other effective drugs. Alcoholic therapeutics were phased out within mainstream American and European medicine by the early 1930s. The three decades between 1930 and 1960 are generally acknowledged as American medicine’s “golden age,” and the development of effective medications to treat a wide range of specific diseases helped propel medicine’s growing professional and cultural authority, as well as its disassociation from alcohol (Burnham 1982: 1474–9).

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Figure 5.2  Absinthe versus alcohol, c. 1900. French cartoon dramatizing the difference between regular drunkenness, and intoxication with absinthe. Alcohol, as illustrated by the man on the left, produces a gentle and somnolent sort of drunkenness. Absinthe, by contrast, produces a violent and angry mood. Image by David Nathan-Maister, Science and Society Picture Library via Getty Images.

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A notable exception to this trend was the attitude of many French physicians, who, in spite of their countrymen’s late nineteenth-century findings that alcohol entered and exited the body virtually unchanged, remained steadfast in their support of French wine for its salubrious effects. Many doctors within the French pro-wine movement considered French wine a healthy beverage (boisson hygienique). They distinguished it from industrially produced distilled spirits, and promoted it as a badge of French national identity (Munholland 2006: 77–90). During the early years of the Third Republic, a growing temperance campaign rooted in the middle class emerged from concerns about the future of France, concerns arising from ashes of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the revolutionary acts of the Paris Commune. Fears of national degeneration were tied to anxieties about rising alcohol consumption in France. Distilled spirits, especially absinthe, were blamed for a range of social and health-related problems, and many French doctors joined the crusade against drink. Yet in parallel with medical support for temperance, a vocal group of physicians fought to distinguish French wine from all other forms of alcohol, promoting it as naturally fermented food that contributed to long life, protected one from cancer and tuberculosis, and above all enhanced the French national character (Munholland 2006: 77–90). French wine was given additional medical endorsement through the pinard, the wine ration made popular as a fortifier of physical strength and courage during the First World War. In 1933, the same year that Prohibition was repealed in the United States, a group of French physicians formed the Médecins amis des vins de France (MAVF) to lobby on behalf of wine. Their activities continued through the Second World War, emerging in the 1950s as early champions of wine’s cardiovascular benefits, as well as its service in the name of good digestion and longevity—anticipating by thirty years wine’s touted role in the “French Paradox” (Munholland 2006: 77–90; Phillips 2014: 203–4).

Alcohol: Drug, Food, Poison Part of the controversy over the identity of alcohol—drug, food, or poison—stemmed from its ubiquity in the United States and Europe. It fulfilled all these roles and more between 1850 and 1950, without even considering its applications in industry: alcohol exerted powerful and diverse effects on individual, social, and political bodies, and this fact was not lost on physicians, dieticians, cookbook writers, captains of industry, pharmacists, saloon keepers, or temperance reformers. Indeed as previously indicated, ethanol served multiple, changing purposes within medicine. In no place was this more evident than the Pharmacopoeia of the United States of America, first published in 1820. The place of alcohol within the Pharmacopoeia reveals the widespread and diverse use of alcohol as a drug. The 1870 Pharmacopoeia, for example, listed four forms of alcohol for the compounding of drugs: “alcohol,” “amylic alcohol” or fusel oil, “diluted alcohol,” and “stronger alcohol,” but alcohol in the forms of Spiritus Frumenti (whiskey), Spiritus Myrcia (bay rum), Spiritus Vini Gallici (brandy) also appeared in the earliest iterations of the medicinal guide, revised every ten years from 1820 until the Second World War. Thereafter, new editions began to appear every five years, a testimony to the increasingly rapid rate at which new drugs were becoming available and replacing many of the older staples of physicians’ therapeutic arsenal.

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Reflecting the vogue of alcohol-based therapeutics during the mid- to late nineteenth century, the number of forms of spirits listed in the Pharmacopoeia rose from 16 in 1870, to 25 in 1890, and then fell precipitously to 15 by 1910. The twelfth revision (1940) listed only eleven forms: aromatic spirit of ammonia, compound spirit of orange, and spirits of anise, camphor, cinnamon, nitroglycerin, lavender, peppermint, and spearmint, along with whiskey and brandy. Brandy and whiskey were removed from the ninth revision of 1910, along with methyl alcohol, but returned with the tenth revision of 1920, which coincided with the ratification of Prohibition in the United States. Indeed, medicinal alcohol offered one way in which “patients” might legally imbibe during the dry years of “The Noble Experiment.” Alcohol was also an important component in the preparation of aethers, extracts, spirits, and tinctures, and a category of drug that sounds familiar to Francophiles, the medicinal class, “wines.” Vinum Opii, or wine of opium, which was made from dried opium, cinnamon, cloves, and “Sherry wine in sufficient quantity” was among a dozen or so dispensed at US pharmacies during the nineteenth century (Pharmacopoeia 1873). Sherry came to be known as “stronger white wine”—we would say “fortified” today—and was used in the preparation of nearly all medicinal Vina until the seventh edition of the Pharmacopoeia (Pharmacopoeia 1882; Pharmacopoeia 1893). The advice given to readers for the use and preservation of white and red wine, moreover, resembled what one might hear from a sommelier or wine merchant: When White Wine is prescribed without further specification, it is recommended that a dry White Wine of domestic production (such as a California Riesling or Ohio Catawba, etc.) should be employed. White wine should be preserved in well-closed casks filled as full as possible, or in well-stoppered bottles, in a cool place. (Pharmacopoeia 1893: 448, 451)

The Pharmacopoeia likewise recommended dry red wines, expressing a preference for native Clarets and Burgundies. Coca wine, a mixture of wine and cocaine, became popular through the efforts of French chemist Angelo Mariani’s “Vin Mariani” in the 1860s, who marketed the beverage as a kind of all-around tonic, or panacea. Vin Mariani appeared slightly later in the United States, and with great fanfare for its champions included Alexander Dumas, Jules Verne, Emile Zola, and Presidents William McKinley and Ulysses S. Grant. One domestically prepared form of the beverage, Pemberton’s French coca wine, was the alcoholic predecessor of Coca-Cola. Coca wine appeared for the first and last time in the 1900 edition of the Pharmacopoeia. The ninth revision of the official formulary, which took place in 1910, after the passing of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, dispensed with the category of wines altogether. Instead, different strengths of pure alcohol were recommended in the preparation of tinctures and spirits. Following the Second World War, spirits were eliminated as a class of drugs, along with both whiskey and brandy. If alcohol’s role as a medicine proved controversial—exiting, returning, and leaving once more the Pharmacopoeia of between 1850 and 1950, its status as a food was equally controversial. The pages of the British Medical Journal hosted an ongoing conversation among physicians about ethanol’s identity between 1861 and 1899, assessing the merits and demerits of considering alcohol as “food or physic” (1861: 557–9). Especially in the 1860s, much attention was paid to French theories of alcohol’s rapid and near complete elimination from the body following its consumption. The editors of the BMJ and other

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Figure 5.3  Vin Mariani: “The original French Coca Wine,” advertisement. From Harper’s Weekly, 1893. Image by Bettman via Getty Images.

physicians suggested that if alcohol were eliminated from the human body swiftly, it could hardly be classified as nourishment or food. Rather, they posited, alcohol was “a foreign agent, which the body gets rid of as soon as it can … something like chloroform, ether, etc.—agents fraught with blessings to humanity, but yet admittedly rather tending to poison than to feed the body of man” (1861: 558). By 1865, another editorial in the BMJ was much in agreement, asking rhetorically “Why, then may not alcohol be, as drugs are, in themselves poisons to the physiological [healthy] body, but correctives of the unnatural—the pathological—states of the civilized body of humanity?” Such a position allowed British physicians to recommend alcohol for their patients, and even to enjoy a refreshing ale themselves with their fellow “brain workers” as a cure for the exhaustion that came from “the wear and tear, for example, of professional life—an unnatural state” (British Medical Journal 1865: 263). Yet it kept them from recommending alcohol as an everyday tonic in the same way some French physicians had extolled the virtues of wine: as a preserver of health. A subsequent verdict rendered by the founder of the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Section on State Health, physician Ezra Mundy Hunt, was more cautious. In his 1877 monograph Alcohol as Food and Medicine—A Paper from the Transactions of the International Medical Congress, Hunt summarized the vast body of international literature on alcohol as medicine and concluded that alcohol did not have any definite food value; that its chief use was as “a cardiac stimulant,” for which there were other options; that it

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was too dangerous for the public to self-administer it, and the medical profession was not responsible for this widespread use; and finally, that commercial alcohols such as brandy, white wine, and whiskey varied far too much in their alcohol content to be accurately dosed—pure ethanol of different, finely calibrated strengths was a better option (137). This last recommendation would wait nearly thirty years before it was gradually implemented in the Pharmacopoeia. Clearly, it was not just French physicians who clung to the medicinal value of some forms of alcohol. Indeed, one Swiss physician L. Schnyder surveyed 1,200 members of Alpine clubs in 1903, only to learn that 78 percent of climbers consumed alcohol regularly, while 72 percent of those responding carried alcohol of some kind with them “in case of need.” Notably, the guides valued wine more than any other form of alcohol, regarding white wine as “refreshing” and “thirst quenching,” but not as “restorative in fatigue” as red wine. Hot red wine, the climbers noted, served as “a cure for nearly all the minor illnesses.” As one review of the study observed, the tippling habits of the Swiss guides were not only a surprise to the author, but likely “a continual source of wonderment to their patrons.” They further cautioned the wise mountaineer to use extreme moderation, and to imbibe only when well-earned fatigue cried out for relief (British Medical Journal 1910: 102–3). The same year that Schnyder surveyed his climbers’ attitudes toward alcohol another alpine nation, Italy, hosted its first national anti-alcohol congress in Venice. By 1907, several provincial and national temperance groups had coalesced to form the Italian Anti-Alcohol Federation (FAI) in Milan, under the leadership of a physician who was also a senator. The group issued its first major study Is Alcohol a Danger for Italy in 1909, and launched its first consolidated attack on wine, which the Italian medical profession, like French physicians and Swiss alpinists, had formerly championed. The FAI’s volume gave voice to physicians who refuted wine’s ability to revitalize the fatigued worker, help digestion, and offer warmth to the chilled body. Likewise, wine was said to have no nutritional or medicinal value, a direct contradiction of the Italian medical profession’s former consensus (Garfield 2006: 61–76). Hoping to settle some of the controversy swirling around alcohol’s status as food, medicine, or poison at the turn of the century, prominent Civil War surgeon, professor of hygiene, and librarian of the United States Surgeon General’s Office John Shaw Billings chaired the Committee of Fifty’s study of the liquor problem from a medical viewpoint. His findings were published in Investigations Concerning the Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, a volume researched and written between 1893 and 1903 (Billings et al. 1903: vols. 1 and 2; Billings et al. 1905: 1–42). A group of physicians, statesmen, businessmen, and scholars irritated by the temperance movement’s wholesale condemnation of alcohol, the Committee of Fifty wished to substitute the “exhortation and argument” that characterized the temperance campaign with information on alcohol that was restricted “to the statement of what appeared to be demonstrable facts and to the inferences which these facts appear to dictate” (Billings et al. 1905: 7). This had been Ezra Hunt’s stated mission as well, of course, yet he and his colleagues at the International Medical Congress were acting at the behest of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and other temperance organizations when investigating the nature of alcohol, and they were clearly sympathetic to the dry side. Members of the physiological sub-committee of the Committee of Fifty by contrast were particularly vexed by the WCTU’s successful campaign to ensure that “Scientific Temperance” was taught in public schools using only WCTU-approved textbooks (Zimmerman 1992;

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Pauly 1996). Moreover, just two years before the founding of the Committee of Fifty, a s­ plinter group from the AMA had established the American Medical Temperance Association (AMTA) with one of the AMA founders, Nathan Smith Davis, as its chair. The physician members of the AMTA enjoyed cordial relations with the WCTU and other temperance organizations, and had as their remit to discover the true nature of alcohol and its appropriate use or disuse in medicine. The membership promoted the use of substitutes for alcohol in clinical therapeutics. Not surprisingly, each of the group’s members had taken a teetotal pledge, a condition they deemed necessary to assess alcohol objectively (Crothers 1893: 8–9). The physicians, scientists, and business leaders of the Committee of Fifty strenuously disagreed, viewing such an act as compromising the AMTA’s intellectual integrity. Ten years of reviewing the international literature on alcohol and its effects—especially the research of committee member and Yale physiological chemist Russell H. Chittenden, a leading investigator of the consequences of alcohol consumption on humans, led the physiological sub-committee to very moderate assessments of the beverage. For most fully grown adults, the consumption of one glass of wine or pint of beer per day with food rarely caused any harm, asserted the scientists. They also observed that alcohol in moderate quantities, like “the starches, sugars, and fats in ordinary food,” served as fuel and protected the body from consuming itself, something it did in times of deep caloric deficit (Billings et al. 1905: 21). The committee was quick to add, however, that alcohol did not contribute to the building or repair of tissue and is not a complete food, that is to say it cannot alone support life permanently, although in certain forms of disease a person may take relatively large quantities of alcohol when he could not well tolerate any other kind of food, and thus be able to survive a special time of stress. (Billings et al. 1905: 22. See also Science 1899: 739–41)

According to the Committee of Fifty, then, alcohol was a “special” food, too expensive and devoid of nutrition to serve as a staple, yet valuable in “rare and special cases.” The physiological subcommittee added that consumption of the beverage also had a kind of tipping point: it might be used as fuel in small to moderate quantities, but in large amounts, and even for some people in smaller amounts, it acted as a poison (Billings et al. 1905: 22–3). Perhaps fearing that they might play into the hands of temperance zealots, the group of scientists noted that even the definition of the word “poison” was murky, and that the conditions and circumstances of alcohol’s use must always be considered. If employed in great quantities, many of the substances normally consumed—coffee, pepper, ginger, salt—also could be considered poisons. Still, members of the physiological sub-committee were certain that the excessive and chronic use of alcoholic drinks produced disease and premature death. In these ways, heavy and habitual drinkers jeopardized their health (Billings et al. 1905: 22–3). Prohibitionists won their campaign against alcohol in the United States. However, their strongest argument condemned the civil disorder, industrial waste, and domestic violence resulting from the saloon, not the bodily or mental harms caused by alcohol. Notably, the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcohol were banned by the Eighteenth Amendment, but not its personal use. The American temperance campaign’s concerns with the fate of an increasingly industrialized, modernized, and urbanized nation were echoed in Germany, France, and Italy, and they especially condemned distilled beverages

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with their higher alcohol content, capable of doing more harm faster than the more traditional fermented alcoholic drinks, beer and wine. Similarly, Mexican concerns with alcohol addressed issues of modernity, national decay, and nation-building during the Porfirian era (1876–1911), when positivist intellectuals exerted a significant influence on the government. One significant difference between the European and American contexts, however, lay in Mexican concerns about the alcoholic drink “pulque,” a fermented beverage derived from the maguey plant, a drink with a millennia-old history. Unique features of Mexican inebriety were attributed to pulque’s special composition, distinct from beer or wine, and its popularity among the working classes. To be sure, pulque had its defenders among Mexican intellectuals and physicians, many regarding the fermented beverage as nutritionally valuable and a means of combating scurvy, nausea, psoriasis, diabetes, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis. As with some of the champions of wine in France, these individuals sometimes had direct ties to the pulque industry (Toner 2015a: 189, 205–11). As the age of empire came to a close, Berton Rouché would voice many of the same tensions that had been expressed in the preceding century in the debate over alcohol’s status as drug, food, or poison. In The Neutral Spirit he noted that while alcohol could be seen as a concentrated form of energy, equal in calories to many foods, he and his scientific colleagues hesitated to give the substance “any real stature as a food.” They reasoned that the calories were in a sense empty calories, and that the “caloric wealth” of alcohol was more than offset by its lack of nutrients (Rouché 1960: 62–3). Of course, individuals who consumed an excess of ethanol, with or without food, were also susceptible to a variety of alcohol-related diseases, most notably alcoholism.

The Inebriety and Alcoholism Movements Prior to 1850, several medical figures—Benjamin Rush and Samuel Woodward in the United States, Thomas Trotter in Britain, and Magnus Huss in Sweden—had each considered some forms of habitual drunkenness as diseased states (Rush 1784; Trotter 1804; Huss 1849). Rush, Woodward, and Trotter referred to the diseases of drunkenness, intemperance, and intoxication, respectively, while Huss was the first to employ the term alcoholism. Still, each physician was concerned about both the chronicity of the problem and the mental and physical symptoms affecting those who drank too much. In addition, there were significant lay efforts to curb the mental, physical, and social problems associated with habitual drunkenness. These dated from the rise of the Washingtonian mutual aid movement of the early 1840s, a grassroots, decentralized movement that saw as many as 600,000 heavy drinkers signing pledges of sobriety and helping their fellow former drinkers stay dry. Almost one hundred years later, in the wake of Prohibition, another lay organization, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), would inaugurate the modern alcoholism movement. AA relied on much the same mutual aid tradition that had begun with the Washingtonians in the 1840s and extended through the fraternal temperance movements of the 1850s and 1860s. Such lay efforts may have started in the United States and Ireland (under Father Mathew in the early 1840s), but the largest were global in reach. The Independent Order of Good Templars, established in Syracuse, New York, in 1852, spread to Canada, England, Scotland, and Scandinavia in the last third of the nineteenth century,

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changing its name to the International Order of Good Templars in 1887. The Blue Ribbon Movement, an alliance of clubs of ex-drinkers who helped one another remain sober, likewise emerged in Maine in the 1870s, but quickly spread across the border to Canada and took up residence in Great Britain with the founding of a Blue Ribbon mission in London in the late 1870s (Lender and Martin 1987: 76–81; Blocker 1989: 30–60; White 1998: 14–20). Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century campaigns to medicalize habitual drunkenness—campaigns that involved physicians and lay reformers alike—spread across the globe to Britain and its empire, Europe, and both Central and North America, and they achieved a remarkable level of organization and popularity. Indeed, the United States experienced not one, but two major medicalization efforts between 1850 and 1950, separated by national Prohibition (1920–33). Each movement expanded beyond the confines of its American base, and was echoed by global efforts to contain alcohol’s damage—individual and social. The first campaign to promote various, evolving disease concepts of drunkenness; to change public policy regarding habitual drunkards; and to build new institutions for their medical treatment, arose during the Gilded Age and persisted well into Progressive Era America. In November 1870, psychiatrists, then called alienists, joined businessmen, politicians, clergy, and reformers of many stripes to form the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates. This was the first professional society in the world devoted to medico-moral care for the heavy chronic drinker. The timing was auspicious for the church, the jail, and the mental asylum had failed to assist the habitual drunkard and the social problems he, and less often she, engendered. Against the backdrop of late nineteenth-century urbanization, immigration, and industrialization, the poverty, disease, workplace injuries and inefficiency, and social disorder accompanying the habitual drunkard appeared all the more pressing. At the same time, in the United States, the medical profession was ascending to new levels of cultural authority, and society increasingly turned to rational, scientific solutions in the name of social, as well as industrial, and government, efficiency (Tracy 2005: 1–24, 63–91). The AACI offered a new way of thinking about and acting on an old problem: specialized professional care for a clinically complicated class of social deviants who were the bane of jail keepers and asylum superintendents alike. Nor was the furor over “what to do with the inebriate?” confined to the chiefs of these institutions. Problem drinkers were loathe to associate with mentally ill patients for their problems would often disappear once they were sober, while insane patients of the asylum held the inebriate in contempt. “I want you to know,” declared one mentally ill patient in 1902 at the Mt. Pleasant (Iowa) State Hospital, which had just begun to take inebriates on a special ward, “I’m no drunken sot; I’m here for my health” (Cherokee (Iowa) Democrat 1902: 2). In the American context, Massachusetts and Iowa built comprehensive systems to medically manage inebriates and tend in part to their social and vocational rehabilitation (Tracy 2005: 147–225). Most of the Western world watched the American experiment in inebriate care eagerly. In Great Britain, the AACI’s counterpart, the Society for the Study of Inebriety, was founded in 1884. Canada, Britain, Australia, France, Denmark, and Switzerland each considered legislation for the institutional treatment of habitual drunkenness, and in some cases, passed it to state-supervised inebriate care. Great Britain established its first “Habitual Drunkards Act” in 1879, but compulsory treatment pertained only to non-criminal inebriates, who could pay for it, while inebriate retreats were given the option to be state-licensed and inspected (Berridge

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Figure 5.4  The New York State Inebriate Asylum, Binghamton. Image by Corbis Historical via Getty Images.

1990: 993). At the dawn of the twentieth century, the largest demographic inhabiting British institutions for inebriates was working-class women whose drinking had led to child neglect. In the early 1870s, Australia erected at least two state-licensed and partially funded inebriate asylums, the Northcote Retreat in Melbourne, and the Asylum for Inebriates in Adelaide. Private asylums proliferated in the United States and elsewhere. Indeed, while the New York State Inebriate Asylum, opened in 1864, claimed to be the world’s first treatment institution specifically for habitual drunkards, a private asylum that opened in West Prussia (now Germany) in 1851 appears to be the first to have offered treatment exclusively to newly released prisoners whose habits of intemperance had led to their incarceration. The wide network of private institutions that prevailed in Germany is detailed by early alcohol historian Ernst Cherrington (1926: 1318–20). In France, matters were slower to evolve. Psychiatrist Paul-Maurice Legrain established the Union française antialcoolique, or French League Against Alcohol, in 1895, to broadcast the ills associated with excess consumption, but even then, there was little interest in treating the inebriate. Not until after the Second World War did the French become concerned about offering medical treatment to those with drinking problems. Ironically, the so-called modern alcoholism movement was inaugurated by two organizations that were largely lay-based: AA and the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol (RCPA), two organizations established in the United States. The latter was a group that began as a scientific enterprise but developed into a clearing house and public relations center for information on alcoholism. Attempting to steer a neutral political course for “the neutral spirit” in the wake of Prohibition, these organizations embraced both the position

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that alcohol was not a universal poison, and the belief that an unfortunate minority of ­individuals were susceptible to ethanol addiction. Drawing upon the ideas of William Silkworth, a physician employed at the Charles B.  Towns Hospital in New York City, AA’s founders William “Bill W.” Wilson and Robert “Dr. Bob” Smith referred to alcoholism as an allergy rather than stating explicitly that it was a disease. Treatment, however, was not medical, but based on what came to be known as the Twelve Steps, a set of principles for achieving sobriety and personal transformation through self-reflection, mutual aid, good works, and surrender to a higher power, whether secular (the AA membership) or religious (Kurtz 1979; White 1998: 127–98). The RCPA, based at Yale University, was founded two years after AA, in 1937. The existence of this new clearinghouse for non-partisan information about alcohol was announced in Science in fall 1938 with some fanfare by secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) F. R. Moulton, who also served as secretary for the new RCPA. Commenting on the first meeting of the RCPA, Moulton observed that its program ranked “in importance with the symposia sponsored by the association [AAAS] on such problems of public health as cancer, tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis and mental health” (White 1998: 330). The Research Council was dependent upon financial support from the liquor industry and, perhaps to no one’s surprise, reinforced alcoholism’s identity as a disease

Figure 5.5  Man speaking at Alcoholics Anonymous, c. 1950. “After three months without a drink, John finds himself an Alcoholics Anonymous crusader, helping the good work of saving others by telling of his successful fight.” Photograph by Bettman via Getty Images.

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to which only certain people were prone, much as they might be prone to diabetes or tuberculosis. Ideas such as this were akin to older holistic medical notions of “diathesis” or “constitutional susceptibility,” resurrected at a time when the medical profession was focusing more narrowly and reductionistically on the specific external agents of disease (bacteria, viruses, cigarette smoke) as well as specific pathological mechanisms. In truth, these accounts of alcoholism’s origins bore a close resemblance to those promoted in the earlier inebriety movement, particularly in the case of hereditary inebriety and dipsomania (Tracy 2005: 276–91). The Yale Center of Alcohol Studies, established in 1943, was a third party instrumental in establishing the modern alcoholism paradigm. Under the direction of statistician E. M. Jellinek and physician and physiologist Howard Haggard, the center employed four different strategies to address the physiology, psychology, and social problems and history of habitual drinking. First, Haggard and Jellinek hired a staff to pursue a multi-disciplinary research program on alcohol and alcoholism. Second, they established in 1940 a research journal, Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, and the Yale Center staff published popular pamphlets and books such as Jellinek and Haggard’s Alcohol Explored (1942). Third, they created the Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies, offering a four-week curriculum to over a thousand teachers, physicians, social workers, ministers, and others between 1943 and 1950 that prepared them to counsel people with drinking problems and their families. Finally, under the direction of physician Giorgio Lolli and educator Raymond McCarthy, the Yale Center established the Yale Plan Clinics, pioneering a new outpatient counseling plan for alcoholics, in coordination with the Connecticut State Prison Association, and promoting the disease concept of alcoholism across the state. The National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (NCEA), the brainchild of public relations woman and reformed alcoholic Marty Mann, grew out of the Yale Center as well, and had as its core mission educating the American public that alcoholism was a disease and should be treated as a public health problem (Tracy 2005: 276–91).

An Evolving Diagnosis—From Intemperance to Alcoholism Between 1850 and 1950, no fewer than four terms were used to describe habitual drunkenness as a disease: intemperance, dipsomania, inebriety, and alcoholism. Each of these terms represented a specific constellation of cultural assumptions about gender, class, ethnicity, heredity, and personal responsibility. Their use followed in rough chronological order between 1850 and 1950. Of the four terms, intemperance described the heavy chronic drinker’s condition with the strongest moral valence. The word invoked the golden rule of moderation championed by church and health evangelists alike. Champions of the disease concept of intemperance implicated a variety of causal factors in the condition. For Philadelphia physician Joseph Parrish (1818–91), however, one dominated all others: the frenetic pace of American life following the Civil War. In his 1870 essay “Philosophy of Intemperance,” Parrish observed that the pressure upon the brain of children by a forcing system of education, the subsequent tax upon the supreme nervous center, in the struggle for wealth, power or position; the

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unhealthy rivalry for display, and all the excitements which produce the “wear and tear” in our life, are so many means of exhausting nervous energy and producing a condition that demands relief. (1870: 29).

Parrish’s rhetoric made clear the ways medical experts saw culture affecting one’s tendency to intemperance, and later dipsomania, inebriety, and alcoholism. Intemperance affected all social classes. Dipsomania was the most popular term used to describe habitual drunkenness in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It referred, literally, to a maniacal thirst for alcohol. A form of monomania, or partial insanity, dipsomania was said to affect its victims periodically, with the intervals between attacks growing shorter as the disease progressed. By stressing the connections between habitual drinking and insanity, dipsomania offered physicians a rhetorical strategy for promoting the disease concept and advancing medical authority over drunkenness. Dipsomania was also said to affect the middle and upper classes more frequently than working-class drinkers. Physicians such as George Miller Beard, who coined the term neurasthenia, believed that the more “refined” nervous systems of society’s upper tiers made them congenitally more susceptible to the stresses of modern life, and dipsomania (1876: 25–48). The dipsomaniac was the least responsible for his or her condition. It is hardly surprising then, that in 1893, when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts opened its first inebriate institution, it was titled the Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates. Dipsomania received top billing for its sufferers were believed to be the sickest, most innocent, and most worthy of medical care. Over time, American physicians determined that the population of dipsomaniacs was actually quite small relative to the number of inebriates. The waning enthusiasm for this diagnosis may also have had something to do with the rise of the “new psychology” of the 1880s and 1890s, and the popularity of psychodynamic psychiatry in the early twentieth century. Changes in the intellectual foundation of psychiatry shifted physicians’ attentions away from the role of defective heredity, so essential to the dipsomaniac’s identity. Although inebriety and dipsomania had co-existed since the 1870s, the ascent of inebriety began in earnest in the 1890s, and it possessed both a specific and a general meaning. It was by far the most common term employed to describe chronic heavy drinking as a disease in the five decades preceding American Prohibition. The same was true in Britain. Psychiatrists and neurologists frequently applied the term “inebriety” to opium, cocaine, heroin, tobacco—even lettuce—addictions (in large quantities lettuce was said to have soothing properties akin to opium). In other words, inebriety was used in much the same way that the term “chemical dependency” is used today: as a global term that encompasses addictions to a variety of psychoactive substances. As dipsomania fell out of fashion, however, the terms “hereditary inebriate” and “periodic inebriate” took its place. By contrast, “simple inebriate” was a diagnostic label applied to those who developed their condition through environmental circumstance and repeated drinking to excess. Frequently, the simple inebriate was seen to develop his or her disease in stages, the first of which did not necessarily involve pathology, but mere drinking to excess. Inebriety in women, or female inebriety, constituted a special case. Women with drinking problems were less common and more stigmatized than their male counterparts. Both temperance workers and physicians were aghast at women who violated their socially prescribed roles as mothers and keepers of society’s morals by leaving the domestic

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sphere and entering the manly homosocial world of drinking—not to reclaim their drunkard husbands, but to indulge themselves. An inebriated woman was synonymous with loose morals, sexual promiscuity, and ruined motherhood. “A debauched woman is always, everywhere, a more terrible object to behold than a brutish man,” declared Berkshire Medical College professor of obstetrics, Horatio Storer in 1867 (Day 1867: 62). The female inebriate threatened the health of her children in utero and at home. Pessimism surrounded the treatment of the female inebriate, for her case appeared to deviate so far from the gendered social norms of her day. Still, there were women-specific facilities for female inebriates in the United States and in England, where women’s habitual drunkenness received far more attention than men’s. In both nations, treatment was oriented around restoring housekeeping skills. Some facilities such as the Farm Colony for Inebriate Women in Duxhurst went a step further, introducing orphans to the institution to nurture maternal instincts in the recovering women (Somerset 1912: 81–5). The specificity of alcoholism mirrored the one germ/one disease paradigm that, by the 1910s, had come to dominate modern medicine. By 1890, laboratory scientists had isolated the microorganisms responsible for typhoid fever (1880), leprosy (1880), malaria (1880), tuberculosis (1882), cholera (1883), and diphtheria (1884). There was growing expectation within the medical community that scientists would find a specific cause or discrete mechanism for each disease, as well as a specific treatment. Habitual drunkenness did not fit this paradigm, but one could point to a single substance at fault in each case: alcohol. Temperance reformers, meanwhile, clung to the conviction that without alcohol there would be no alcoholism. Indeed, the movement from process to substance was in keeping with temperance rhetoric that portrayed alcohol as a uniformly corrupting substance—a poison. If intemperance, dipsomania, and inebriety denoted a state of mind (intoxicated or insane), alcoholism denoted poisoning by alcohol. The terms “morphinism” and “cocainism” indicated poisoning by other psychoactive substances. This conceptual transition fit well with anti-alcohol groups such as the WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League, and the Prohibition Party in the United States, organizations that succeeded in bringing about the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920, outlawing the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. Still, just south of the US border, Mexican physicians might mean many things when they referred to alcoholism. In the Porfirian era, the term might signify “a disease itself, a mental condition, or merely a physically harmful behavior” (Toner 2015a: 201). Clearly, between nations there was diagnostic slippage. For people with alcohol problems, American Prohibition, in the long run, was not a success. Once again, the problem drinker was viewed as a moral weakling whose only options were the jail cell, or if mentally impaired, the psychiatric hospital. Likewise, the substantial knowledge base of medical experts on the nature and treatment of alcoholism was discarded, dismissed, or forgotten by most of the researchers who investigated alcoholism following Repeal in the United States. Pharmacologist Chauncey Leake was one of the few to lament this loss, observing in 1957 that some of the nation’s best physiologists, physicians, and pharmacologists—men such as John Shaw Billings, Russell Chittenden, Yandell Henderson, and William Welch—had produced a considerable body of research on alcohol and its effects. The previously discussed Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem was a compendium of data on alcohol. Leake, in words reminiscent of medical

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writer Berton Roueché, was astonished at “how little appreciation has been given to this important work,” and how “amazing” it was that so little is known (Himwich 1957: foreword). Making haste to distance themselves from wet versus dry politics of the previous generation, most alcohol researchers in the 1940s and 1950s dismissed the findings of their predecessors. The proverbial wheel was invented once again. When medical experts returned to a consideration of alcoholism post-Prohibition, the disease was deemed one that affected only a certain predisposed minority of the population. Researchers stressed that it was also a disease that took many forms. Leaders of the modern alcoholism movement E. M. Jellinek and Howard Haggard, for example, warned in 1942 that In dealing with this problem [alcoholism], no order can be expected until it is generally recognized that it is not one of inebriety, but of inebrieties. This distinction is not only of theoretical significance but of practical significance in the treatment and prevention of inebriety. The prevalent failure to make distinctions among the categories of inebrieties has obscured many phases of the research in this field. (Haggard and Jellinek 1942: 144)

When Jellinek released his landmark The Disease Concept of Alcoholism in 1960, he was careful to distinguish among different phases and types of alcoholism prevalent in different drinkers and different cultures across the globe.

Institutions for Inebriates—Evolving Systems of Care The diversity of terms used to describe problematic heavy drinking throughout the age of empire reflected an increasingly sophisticated understanding of alcoholism’s etiology—one that acknowledged heredity, environmental circumstance, and individual temperament. As a result, treatment during this time took many forms. Inebriate homes, asylums, hospitals, and farm colonies were established throughout the United States, and to a lesser extent in the British Isles, Europe, and Scandinavia. Some were run by the state; others catered to private, paying clientele; some legally confined their patients; others accepted only voluntary admissions. There were homes where Christianity and conversion dominated care, and there were facilities that treated only women or men. In spite of these differences, certain elements of care—physical rehabilitation, psychotherapy, an ethic of mutual assistance, varied recreations, and occupational training and placement—were common to most institutions. In theory and in practice, holism was the order of the day to treat this sociomedical disease. Yet, there were important exceptions. The most popular facilities for inebriates were the Keeley Institutes, named after their founder, physician Leslie E. Keeley. Peddling a secret or proprietary cure called “Bi-Chloride of Gold,” Keeley Institutes administered it in a regimented daily fashion, while offering a supportive social setting where manly camaraderie and patriotism set the tone; inebriates received injections of red, white, and blue drugs. It is unclear whether the same color scheme obtained in Australia, England, Finland, Denmark, Mexico, and Sweden, which were the farthest outposts of the so-called “Keeley Cure.” Between 1880 and 1920, over 500,000 individuals were treated at the 118 Keeley Institutes, which peppered the United States and Canada. Without a doubt, Leslie E. Keeley and his Keeley franchises were instrumental in spreading the disease concept of inebriety.

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Figure 5.6  “The Keeley Cure: For liquor and drug use,” advertisement, 1907. Image by Jay Paull, Archive Photos via Getty Images.

Part of the appeal of the Keeley Cure and others like it was their adherence to an acute model of alcoholism for which a specific cure was administered for a much shorter time than the one- to three-month stays advocated by most medical institutions. This focus paralleled the one-germ/one-disease model that was on the ascent in turn-of-the-century Western medicine. Still, the secrecy, specificity, and proprietary nature of the Keeley Cure and its numerous imitators were heresy to the AACI psychiatrists and neurologists who promoted the disease concept within mainstream medicine. For them, such care advanced a false model of alcoholism, which they saw as a chronic condition requiring lifetime vigilance. Keeley’s hyperbolic claims of a 95 percent cure rate nurtured unrealistic expectations that were dashed as inebriates relapsed following treatment. The recidivism of Keeley patients led to both the decline of the Keeley treatment and a general skepticism about the medical profession’s management of inebriety. By 1920, popular attitudes had been shaped by this skepticism as much as they were molded by the anti-drunkard sentiment advanced by the WCTU. Non-proprietary inebriate asylums and hospitals, which saw their goal as restoring an individual’s health and social functioning, addressed the social, the medical, and the moral aspects of the problem. This hybrid sociomedical approach guided the efforts of one of the most respected inebriate hospitals in the country, the Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates (later called the Foxborough State Hospital and the Norfolk State Hospital), which opened in 1893. At Foxborough, alcoholism was treated as a chronic disease that demanded the reforming drinker’s ongoing attention, as well as inpatient and aftercare relationships with medical staff. Treatment was designed to restore health as well as participation in respectable community organizations such as the YMCA, and to train the patient in a profitable trade, prefatory to him acquiring gainful employment. Indeed, securing a job became a requirement for hospital release. The superintendent encouraged patients to write him at least monthly, and to return to the hospital should they relapse or feel in danger of falling off the wagon. “I feel quite sure that the unexpected and unanticipated relapse will in reality react in your favor,” wrote Norfolk Superintendent Irwin Neff to one patient, “as it will show you that at an unguarded moment your weakness may re-appear without any premonition” (Neff 1915). The definition of what constituted therapeutic success evolved over time at the Massachusetts hospital, moving from “total abstinence” to “material improvement”

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even if individuals relapsed or drank occasionally. Between 1908 and 1920, approximately 45 percent of patients were classified as “materially improved” (Tracy 2007: 89). The irony of the Massachusetts story is that the state closed the hospital with the arrival of Prohibition, at the point at which it had developed a successful system of inpatient and outpatient care for alcoholics. The same was true for the state of Iowa’s inebriate facilities and for the many public and private homes and asylums across the United States and in Europe, as funding the First World War took priority on both sides of the Atlantic. By the 1910s, physicians and their many allies in inebriate reform had gained a sophisticated sociomedical understanding of alcoholism and its treatment. Yet, with the Volstead Act passed, and the wartime economy gaining momentum, jobs were plentiful. As young men left their factory posts to fight in the war, employers were more willing to hire and retain employees with a history of drinking problems. Institutional censuses dwindled as enthusiasm for Prohibition mounted and employers’ standards declined. In the end, the medical reform of inebriates was a casualty of both the First World War and a Prohibition policy that reformers hoped would eliminate alcohol across the land. In the United States, alcoholics were sent once more to jail and to state hospitals to dry out. As the First World War became a priority for nations across the globe, fewer and fewer devoted resources to caring for their inebriates, often for many of the same reasons as in the United States, though not national Prohibition. The first multi-national movement to medicalize habitual drunkenness and erect new institutions to treat the disease of inebriety had come to an end by 1920. In the United States, a handful of proprietary private hospitals for inebriates remained open after 1920. The Charles B. Towns Hospital, where AA founder Bill Wilson received care, was one of them. But Wilson and his co-founder Robert Smith championed a lay-based system of mutual aid when they established AA, a Twelve-Step model that came to dominate alcoholism treatment in the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond. The Yale Plan Clinics offered a model that others imitated, blending social services with outpatient medical and psychosocial care in a way that was reminiscent of Norfolk State Hospital. Employee assistance programs (EAPs) also offered an entrée to special care for many problem drinkers; these programs were pioneered in the 1940s by firms such as Eastman Kodak and the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Company. Frequently using recovered alcoholic employees as spokespersons, EAPs won support for heavy drinkers by stressing the expense to industry caused by absenteeism, inefficiency, and on-the-job injuries. By the 1950s, medical groups such as the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association Council on Science and Public Health, and the American Hospital Association had issued statements addressing alcoholism’s status as a disease or condition best served by general hospitals and mutual aid groups, namely, AA. By the mid-twentieth century, then, a new groundswell of support for the disease concept of alcoholism and its medical treatment, followed by ongoing social support for the alcoholic, had once more become a part of Western medicine.

Conclusion The years following the repeal of Prohibition in the United States are often labeled the “Age of Ambivalence” toward alcohol. Following the rebirth of the alcoholic beverage industry and the relaxation of prohibitions against drinking, Americans and Europeans alike devised new and returned to old ways in managing the harms caused by ethanol. The ties between

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alcohol consumption and traffic fatalities, sexual assault, birth defects, and a host of health problems beyond alcoholism were in the public eye more than ever as researchers, caregivers, and policy makers faced the challenges of living in a society where ethanol flowed freely. Reviewing the relationship between alcohol and health between 1850 and 1950 reaffirms the ambivalence surrounding alcohol in relation to health and well-being. Yet it also suggests that ambivalence toward alcohol, in both medical and social contexts, began much earlier and extended across the globe. As we have seen, the appropriate place of alcohol in medical therapeutics; alcohol’s identity as food, drug, or poison; and the moral and medical status of the problem drinker were all contested from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. In other words, Berton Roueché’s words about alcohol’s controversial place in civil society were as true in 1950 as they were in 1850, and as they are today. This is more testimony to the many roles alcohol plays within Western culture than it is to what we actually know about alcohol and alcoholism. And this is unlikely to change.

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6

GENDER AND SEXUALITY STELLA MOSS

“Rightly or wrongly, gender plays a major role in shaping the ways the world drinks.” (Heath 2015: 72)

Introduction Gender and sexuality have long played a central role in drinking practices, both shaping and reflecting ideals and experiences of masculinity and femininity across different historical periods and geographical settings. Notwithstanding the significant biochemical, physiological, and pharmacokinetic factors which influence individual responses to alcohol consumption, drinking is also a cultural act, embedded in social codes, rules, and attitudes which are shaped by gender, as well as class, ethnicity, age, and nationality, among other influences (Chrzan 2013: 5). Historical and contemporary alcohol cultures have been molded by cultural codes which in broad terms posit male drinking as normative and female drinking as both comparatively less common and more socially problematic. In this framework, drinking and drunkenness have been construed as manly behavior, often condoned and sometimes valorized as evidence of individual masculinity. By contrast, women’s drinking has long been interpreted in relation to deeply rooted cultural norms equating idealized femininity with temperance and sobriety. In many social settings, female alcohol consumption has been considered unfeminine and unrespectable, with drunkenness in particular associated with physical degeneration and moral bankruptcy. While of course there are many examples of gendered drinking practices which sit outside this binary framework, the cultural impact and interpretive longevity of these archetypes should not be underestimated (Heath 2015: 72–6). In considering gendered drinking much insightful multi- and inter-disciplinary research into contemporary consumption patterns and cultures has emerged in recent years. As rich literatures from diverse fields including anthropology, sociology, and psychology have explored, in the context of drinking cultures gender is often a critical influence on the formation, expression, and contestation of identities and subjectivities (Gefou-Madianou 1992; McDonald 1994; Plant 1997; de Garine and de Garine 2001; Chrzan 2013; Heath 2015). Drawing partly on this fruitful scholarship, historians have begun to uncover the rich influence of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality on drinking cultures in past societies. In terms of the period c.1850–1950, a vibrant literature on women’s drinking has now emerged and continues to develop, featuring discussion of diverse countries including Britain, America, Canada, and Australia. There has been notable discussion of the problematization of the woman drinker, including about the moralized regulation of female intoxication (Hunt et al. 1989; Waterson 2000). There has also been consideration of how women drinkers contested

and transgressed established cultural norms which militated against their presence in public drinking venues through patronizing bars and pubs previously associated with male consumers (Rotskoff 2002; Langhamer 2003). In a reflection of historical drinking cultures themselves, in much of the scholarly literature, unless identified specifically as female, there is a historiographic tendency to assume the drinker is male. Moreover, while many existing studies focus primarily on male drinking cultures, specific exploration of cultural codes of masculine consumption often remains implicit and under-analyzed. There has been some discussion of the spatial contexts and material cultures which shaped male drinking habits (Powers 1998; Moss 2015; Toner 2015a), but there remains scope for much further exploration.1 In terms of sexuality, there has been some discussion of the cultural ties between drinking cultures and courtship practices, and also of the links between bars and prostitution, but again these issues tend to be more marginal themes within broader histories of alcohol consumption and regulation (e.g., Harrison 1971). Overall, then, historiographic interest in gendered drinking cultures in the period c.1850–1950 has developed in rewarding directions in recent years, although there remains much scope for further research. This chapter focuses on public drinking cultures. The significance of gender within drinking venues, together with the richness of cultural histories of bars and other premises, opens up productive opportunities to reflect on masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, each of which is explored in turn. Particular attention is paid to social norms and codes of conduct, building on broader historiographic recognition that male and female subjectivity and behavior cannot be reduced to essentialized biological givens. Instead, masculinity and femininity can be conceived as relating to a spectrum of gendered behaviors or “performances” (Rose 2010). Such an approach can illuminate the ways in which drinkers both expressed and sometimes contested dominant norms of masculinity and femininity, including in relation to contrasting gendered norms around public drunkenness. While there was marked continuity in some of the relationships between gender and alcohol in the period 1850–1950, new gendered dynamics also emerged.

Masculinity and Drinking Cultures Across the period c.1850–1950, public drinking was often perceived primarily as a male social practice. With regards to mid-nineteenth-century English drinking cultures, for instance, Harrison contended that the public house represented a “masculine republic” (1973: 172). As is later explored, claims from both contemporaries and historians that women did not participate in popular drinking practices have often been misplaced or exaggerated. Nonetheless, it is clear that in many settings male customers formed an irrefutable majority. Spaces of homosocial recreation were often prized, not least owing to a perceived differentiation from domestic and familial spheres. For many this distinction was predicated at least partly on the absence of women. All-male settings were sometimes associated with heavy drinking and habitual drunkenness. In many cultural contexts, inebriation was normalized within social codes of manly public drinking. Heavy drinking was often sanctioned and even encouraged at key moments across the social calendar, such as holidays and festivities. The ability to maintain social status during and/or after episodes of acute intoxication was often crucial to participation and acceptance within the drinking cultures of a particular community. Access to, and participation in, the homosocial sociability of

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drinking venues often constituted recognition of a certain manly status in a local community. Regular p ­ atronage of a bar would often connote the cultivation and expression of group identity, while at the same time offering opportunities for the articulation and expression of manly competition and gendered hierarchies. Diverse evidence reveals the prevalence of masculine drinking cultures across different geographic and temporal contexts, including from nineteenth-century Mexican pulquería bars (Toner 2015a), French cafés during the Belle Époque (c.1871–1914) (Haine 1996), and Irish pubs in the 1930s (Kearns 1997). Though varied across borders, among different peoples and communities, and during different time periods, masculine drinking cultures were also inevitably shaped by key transnational social, cultural, political, and economic forces. In a host of geographic settings, drinking cultures in this period were molded by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, with male workers especially seeking out drinking venues. In Ghana in the late nineteenth century, young male laborers migrating to work in railway construction or mining would seek out bars in local townships (Akyeampong 1996b), while in early twentieth-century Russia, urban taverns were much patronized by male factory workers (Phillips 2000). Wartime could foster an expansion of cultural connections linking drink and masculinity. Despite critique from pro-temperance campaigners, in France during the First World War, wine-drinking among troops was often encouraged. Soldiers’ pinard (“plonk”) was thought to both inculcate and reveal the patriotic expression of martial masculinity, with communal consumption cementing bonds between men (Munholland 2006). Contrasting with experiences linked to the cultivation and expression of shared identity, masculine drinking cultures in this period were also often fractured along deep fault-lines of differentiation, especially in the context of imperial hierarchies. In colonial Kenya, for instance, the security concerns of white settlers entwined African alcohol consumption with issues of law and order, and by extension with the exercise of masculine authority, leading to new regulatory frameworks designed to control consumption (Ambler 1991). Overall, then, while particular geographic and temporal settings were characterized by specific gendered drinking cultures, there are also notable continuities and similarities. The archetype of the virile male drinker was not, of course, universal or uncontested. Throughout the years c.1850–1950, powerful contrasting ideals of masculinity promoted abstinence from alcohol as emblematic of manly self-control. Of central importance here was the teetotaler, sometimes portrayed as a husband and father, who considered alcohol as physically damaging and morally corrupting, and whose anti-drink beliefs were lauded as a sign of masculine virtue. Iterations of these ideals were discernable in England (Harrison 1971) and America (Powers 1998), for example. Medicalized critiques of male drunkenness (including on eugenic lines) were also a feature of temperance lobbying, as was witnessed around the turn of the twentieth century in France (Prestwich 1988) and Belgium (Scholliers 2000). In diverse geographic and temporal contexts, male inebriation was also perceived as a cause of social degeneracy and source of political and economic instability. In late nineteenth-century Germany, the demands of industrialization meant that workers’ drinking habits came under close scrutiny, with alcohol blamed for industrial inefficacies such as absenteeism (Roberts 1981). In the attempt to control drinking and drunkenness among indigenous populations, numerous colonial administrations implemented prohibition policies: for example, under French rule a temperance campaign was launched in Côte d’Ivoire

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in the early twentieth century (White 2007). Across the period c.1850–1950, a variety of alternate masculine ideals stood in marked contrast with the typology of the male drinker. In exploring more fully the social codes and gendered performances associated with public drinking, striking examples can be discerned in America in the period up to the introduction of Prohibition in 1920 (Powers 1998). Shaped by the powerful forces of urbanization and mass migration, the saloon became a much-prized center of working men’s sociability. For many it was a welcome refuge from the exigencies of poorly paid manual labor and dire housing. Amid the often alienating anonymity of urban life, the saloon offered opportunities to forge new social ties, including via the ritual free lunch served in many premises. Saloons were very popular at the end of working day, especially among many young, unmarried men who, faced with the prospect of shabby boarding houses, sought out the comparative comfort and camaraderie of the bar. Local premises could be a valuable place to seek out information about nearby employment opportunities, thus further underlining the connections linking drinking venues and work cultures. Indeed, in many towns and cities saloon sociability was shaped partly by the associational culture of workers’ unions. Participation in local branch meetings and social gatherings afforded men opportunities to forge and consolidate their identities and status as wage-earners, as well as contribute to, and benefit from, collective campaigning for improved pay and conditions. As such, the saloon constituted a valued center of socio-political sociability, as well as associational recreation (Powers 2006). Men’s experiences of, and attitudes toward, saloon culture were also shaped by forces of migration. The saloon offered opportunities to cultivate attachments to new communities among both native- and foreign-born migrants alike. Across the mid-nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, diverse ethnic and national groups sought out the saloon. These included African Americans migrating from the impoverished rural south, as well as “Old” and “New” wave migrants arriving from northern and western Europe and the British Isles, and southern and eastern Europe respectively. Saloons flourished across urban America, among them premises associated with African-American, Irish, Italian, and German communities. Although racialized slurs about ethnic intemperance were also common, saloons were instrumental in providing familiar cultural settings for those newly arrived. Within a congenial social setting, customers would converse in common languages and dialects, share news from, and stories about, home, and exchange information about employment opportunities and lodgings. In turn, proprietors (very often migrants themselves) would cultivate patronage, including by serving drinks and food traditional to particular migrant communities. Saloons offered opportunities for (re)connection with familiar cultural practices during times of social dislocation, and this, coupled with the broader appeal of drink-fueled sociability and camaraderie, rendered the saloon a valued social space among many migrant men (Powers 1998: 55–64). Common to premises in different locations and with diverse clientele was a core saloon culture of masculine sociability and mutuality. Codes of homosocial recreation predominated, with the bar recognized as an all-male space. For the individual, performance of coded masculine practices would establish and consolidate manly identity. Simultaneously, men would often compete for status, thus ensuring that at least some aspects of saloon culture were rooted in public displays of machismo, including heavy drinking. Barroom lore was predicated on a number of interlinking social practices. The ability to hold one’s liquor

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was one key factor: those unable to match their companions glass for glass were open to ridicule from fellow drinkers. This could lead to competitive drinking, and result in acute intoxication, but for those involved, participation in these social rituals was emblematic of their manly status among their peers (Powers 1998: 89–91). Linked to these practices was the culture of treating. If treated to a drink, a saloon-goer had to buy one in return for the purchaser or, less commonly, reciprocate with an acceptable substitute. The ritual of treating entailed a social performance of reciprocity. Moreover, in a cultural context where low wages were typical, a public demonstration of the drinker’s economic capacity for full participation in barroom practices conveyed a breadwinning, manly status. With patrons purchasing drinks by turns in groups, drinking in “rounds” was predicated on the equitable treatment of each individual consumer. Those who could not afford to take their turn tended to avoid saloons, such were the expectations associated with treating rituals. Those found cadging drinks and not paying their own way were subject to public shame and censure, which in turn could have a damaging effect on a man’s local reputation (Powers 1998: 93–118). Also important were the barroom games that constituted and reflected masculine performances of physical skill and mental acuity. Darts, dice, and cards were all commonplace. Betting on barroom games was common, as well as gambling on the outcome of local and national sporting events, such as baseball matches and horse races. Those able to

Figure 6.1  Cowboys drink and play card games in a saloon, c. 1890. Photograph by American Stock Archive via Getty Images.

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demonstrate knowledge and aptitude in games and betting accrued the admiration of their peers. Such jostling for social prestige among bar patrons was of course linked to wider cultures of manly competition. Barroom culture was also rooted in a verbal lore, which not only privileged cordial conversation, but also ritualized banter. The recounting of tales, both everyday and exceptional, and the telling of (sometimes bawdy) jokes fostered homosocial sociability and communal entertainment. Finally, of course, there was the appeal of liquor itself. Beer and whisky were the predominant drinks, and while communal drunkenness was a common sight, prevailing social codes dictated that a man should not be a “sloppy drunk,” and in numerous settings there was a preference for more moderate consumption (Powers 2006: 150). While intoxication was doubtless the chief goal for some, for many the appeal of the saloon bar was the all-male sociability and the culturally embedded cultivation of manly status. The coming of Prohibition in 1920 saw the decline of these forms of manly drinking within the American saloon (Powers 1998: 234–6). It is striking, however, that many of these practices found close parallels in other locations and time periods. Though of course by no means a precise cultural replication, many of the social norms which regulated manly drinking in the saloon could also be found in the English public house in the 1920s and 1930s. Alternative commercial recreations like the cinema were by then available, proving highly popular especially among the young as venues for both single-sex and mixed-gender sociability. Nonetheless, the pub retained considerable cultural pull, particularly for middleaged men. Of central importance to pub culture was the emphasis on the main public bar as an all-male space. Numerous social commentators pointed to the entrenched social convention which militated against women drinkers. Linked to this was a range of important cultural codes considered constitutive of manly drinking. Standing to drink—often known among social surveyors as “perpendicular drinking”—was perceived as a sign of manliness, and the bar’s limited seating often remained unused. As anti-drink campaigners had long complained, compared with sitting standing to drink increased rates of consumption. Heavy drinking was often commonplace (though not universal) and, especially at paydays and weekends, led to socially accepted and culturally embedded intoxication. Notably, away from the main bar in the adjacent taproom, other codes of gendered performance allowed scope for alternate public displays of masculinity, including, in a striking parallel with the American saloon, the playing of games. Cards, dominoes, and darts were all seen as constitutive of manly status, with sitting accepted and expected (Moss 2015). As in the American saloon, treating and drinking in rounds were key practices. With beer the standard drink of choice, there was a notable emphasis on drinking from pint glasses. Half-pint vessels were dismissed as emasculated and many would refuse them. In addition, the plain, sometimes shabby decoration in the bar was considered a visual cue as to the manly cultures accommodated there. In these ways, the material culture of the public bar was thought to contribute to, and reflect, the manly practices pursued there (Moss 2015). Those unable to patronize local bars and pubs, for instance through poverty and unemployment, were sometimes met with sympathy or even scorn, such was the perceived emasculation linked to absence from drinking cultures (Davies 1992). Parallel with these American and English examples, public drinking in Australian pubs was often closely tied to the cultivation and expression of manliness. While cultures of masculine drinking continued to be much celebrated and mythologized in the era after 1950,

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Figure 6.2  Gambling Den, c. 1875. Interior view of a saloon, where a group of men sit gambling at a table and workers pose in the background. Photograph by Al Greene Archive via Getty Images.

certainly by the turn of the twentieth century pub bars were associated with strident masculinity, which sometimes inclined toward competitive machismo. Alongside the practices of perpendicular drinking, games-playing, gambling, and ritualized banter seen elsewhere, as Kirkby has contended, drinking was linked to a “patriotic identification with being Australian” (2006: 203). Consumption habits were molded partly by influential cultural norms relating to beer consumption. Habits were shaped to an extent by environmental context and something of a mythologized preoccupation with slaking thirst in the antipodean heat, especially among hard-working laborers. Moreover, licensing regulation also shaped consumption patterns, including in unintended ways. During the Great War opening hours in licensed premises were reduced, with early closing introduced in 1916. This ushered in the era of the notorious “six o’clock swill,” which involved a communal rush at the bar at the end of the working day, with men consuming as much as possible, as fast as possible, before closing time (Luckins 2008). Enmeshed in this public display was a competitive bravura which underscored the importance of beer drinking as manly performance. Not surprisingly, this led to social norms which, while not uncontested, broadly condoned intoxication within the cultural setting of the pub (Kirkby 2006). Cultures of treating were significant, with the “shout” as it was known, central to participation in cultures of manly comradeship. As in other societies where treating prevailed,

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for young men initiation and acceptance into this ritualized custom was a notable rite of passage. Treating was a formative influence in the development of the cultures of egalitarian comradeship that were especially privileged within Australian barroom culture. “Mateship” and its attendant ritualized banter were widely perceived as integral to the cultivation and expression of masculine identities (Kirkby 2006). Crucially, however, the legal exclusion of Aboriginal men from licensed premises equated to a profound mitigation against commonplace assertions about the Australian barroom as a site of social equality. In short, the bar was a white man’s space. It was not until the 1970s that Aboriginal people were permitted to purchase alcohol from licensed vendors, marking a very significant racialized restriction which had a deep impact on consumption practices, including in relation to gender (Fitzgerald and Jordan 2009). A range of commonalities can be discerned from these examples of American, English, and Australian public bars, as indeed from many others. The cultural norms linked to consumption habits, the fellowship and banter between men, and the use of space and material culture are among the key ways in which men’s drinking cultures both contributed to and reflected the expression of masculinity. Overall, across the period c.1850–1950 men’s drinking cultures were often perceived, and indeed celebrated, as a means of forging masculine identity. Camaraderie and communality co-existed alongside rivalrous competition in creating and sustaining a popular cultural setting where public displays of drinking and indeed drunkenness would help secure a man’s place within his local community and even, when among strangers, help generate symbolic status of manliness.

Femininity and Drinking Cultures Male drinking was often conceptualized as normative, not least because in many social settings men formed the majority of customers within drinking venues. However, any assertion that women were wholly absent from drinking cultures was very often inaccurate and misplaced. There is considerable evidence, for instance, about the popularity of cafés with women customers in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with many joining their husbands, as well as socializing with female friends and relatives. Haine (1996: 199–201) has demonstrated that women felt comfortable in these venues, consuming principally wine, brandy, beer, and absinthe in moderation, and participating actively in café sociability. In numerous drinking venues, often women formed an important minority of customers, with many individuals valuing the social networks and companionship they experienced. In broad terms, across the century up to 1950, in many—though by no means all—social settings in numerous countries, women’s drinking came to be regarded as increasingly acceptable, and was also seen more commonly in public. These significant developments have attracted recent scholarly attention: taking the English case historians including Langhamer (2003) and Gutzke (2013) have explored the expansion and growth of women’s drinking cultures in the period up to 1950. Yet even notwithstanding this overall trend toward more frequent incidence and greater cultural acceptance of women’s public drinking, in the period up to the mid-twentieth century (and indeed beyond in many cases) women’s drinking was often regarded as more problematic than men’s. Not surprisingly, intoxication was considered especially troublesome. Critique of women’s drinking focused to a significant extent on public consumption,

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although anxieties were also raised about domestic drinking in the home (Murdock 1998: 95–113). It is clear there were many contexts across different geographic and temporal settings where women were discouraged (sometimes strenuously) from patronizing public drinking venues. It was sometimes the case that male drinkers, and social commentators more broadly, often conceptualized women drinkers in masculinized terms. In 1930s Dublin women market traders who frequented pubs were often portrayed by male customers in masculine terms, their alleged capacity for heavy drinking, swearing, and occasional brawling differentiating them from “feminine” women who did not patronize pubs (Kearns 1997: 41–2). Fears were often raised that women consumers were more vulnerable to liquor’s intoxicating effects. Although by no means restricted to the period 1850–1950, concerns related to interlinking social, moral, and medical problems, including drink-fueled sexual immorality and maternal drinking (Plant 1997). This problematization of the female drinker emerged partly in concert with influential social codes prevalent especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which linked morally upright femininity with temperance: indeed, this had been a foundational premise for many women’s anti-drink campaign groups, including the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (Tyrell 1991). The perceived contrast between the morally honorable temperance reformer and the depraved and dissolute drinker invoked an essentialized binary, but nevertheless remained a powerful cultural script which shaped both attitudes toward, and experiences of, women’s drinking. Yet cutting across these influences, it was often the case that while women’s public drinking was broadly discouraged in given social settings, specific forms of female alcohol

Figure 6.3  Temperance Movement: “Ohio Whiskey War,” 1874. Sketch by S. B. Morton, The ladies of Logan singing hymns in front of barrooms in aid of the temperance movement. Image by Bettman via Getty Images.

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consumption might be tolerated and even encouraged in particular contexts. In Dublin between the world wars women often patronized pubs on the occasion of funerals and wakes, the usual social norms which privileged the main drinking bars as male spaces having been overturned (Kearns 1997: 43). Although discouraged from frequenting taverns, women factory employees in early twentieth-century Russia would hold drinking parties to celebrate the marriage of a fellow female worker (Phillips 2000: 100). In many cases, the exceptional and infrequent nature of these occasions made the contrast with the norm all the more striking. Anxieties about women’s alcohol consumption often emerged during periods of heightened social turmoil, including during wartime. Alleged socio-moral harms linked to drink were often associated with wider social dislocation. In England during the First World War an alleged rise in female drunkenness was considered by some to be emblematic of broader social and moral tumult at a time of national crisis. The years 1914–18 saw considerable debate about the place of alcohol in English society, with new government restrictions introduced to stem an alleged tide of insobriety among war workers which was considered a threat to the war effort, and productivity in munitions factories in particular. The new state body in charge of alcohol, the Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic), paid particular attention to assertions about spiraling levels of alcohol consumption across the country (Duncan 2013). While concerns were raised about drunkenness more generally, including among male munitions workers, particular disquiet was raised about women drinkers. Claims were made about widespread drunkenness among the wives of servicemen, who were thought to be spending improvident sums in pubs while neglecting their children and homes. Anxieties were also raised about purported increases in drinking among young women. Temperance campaigners asserted that many young women munition workers had developed pub-­going habits as a result of high wartime wages and the burgeoning social freedoms associated with war work. Alarm was raised about these young women being at risk of descent into drink-fueled immorality (Moss 2008). In light of these allegations the Central Control Board formed a Women’s Advisory Committee to explore the extent of women’s drinking since the outbreak of war. Following expert evidence from a range of medical and welfare authorities, the Committee found that many claims of female insobriety were greatly exaggerated. It noted that while numbers of women patronizing pubs had increased since the outbreak of war, consumption by the vast majority remained moderate. Claims of widespread drunkenness, especially among servicemen’s wives, were considered not only inaccurate, but also an unjustified slur against their respectability and patriotism. Overall, the moral opprobrium leveled at female drinkers molded and mirrored wider social anxieties about women’s status during wartime, not least in relation to the tensions between contributing to the war effort and maintaining family life. Moreover, these debates also reflected social tensions about the public house as a chief site of public drinking practices, especially among the working classes, and gendered tensions about women’s purported encroachment on male social space. Crucially, discussion during the Great War revealed much about the construction and contestation of femininity, with varied and sometimes strongly contrasting views in circulation about whether drinking, especially in public, was compatible with other norms of cultural respectability among women (Moss 2008).

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In considering attitudes toward, and experiences of women’s drinking, exploration of the gendering of the social spaces of bars and pubs is critical. Taken in very broad terms, across the period c.1850–1950, while many licensed premises featured more than one room, the main bar would be occupied predominantly and sometimes wholly by men. Typically, restrictions against women’s presence were not framed via statutory regulation, but enforced by entrenched and highly influential social conventions. Even in premises where women were refused service, it was often the case that female employees could be found working behind the bar. Often their presence was perceived as a deterrent against masculine rowdiness and heavy drinking, and as such landladies, barmaids, and other women workers were perceived as figures of authority who merited respect. Varied examples of such practices can be found across a range of settings in this period: for example, as Malleck (2012) has noted, in Ontario, Canada, in the 1930s women’s employment was encouraged by licensing authorities as fostering moderate drinking and social respectability, at the very same time as female drinking was perceived as socially problematic. While the main bar in many venues was a male-only space, crucially many premises did possess other drinking rooms where women’s patronage was accepted and indeed encouraged. This was the case in pre-Prohibition American saloons where back rooms were often notable spaces of female sociability (Powers 1998: 33–5). While some male patrons and social commentators may have considered these spaces as inferior to all-male bars, such dismissals downplayed the vibrant social networks that women often established in these drinking spaces. Especially in the years after the Great War, English pubs featured several rooms and bars where women would drink. As will later be explored, the lounge was a site of mixed drinking, but it was also a place for all-female gatherings, its popularity rooted partly in a comfortable salubriousness which connoted comparative respectability. In addition, the snug, a small drinking room which could accommodate sometimes only two or three drinkers, was much frequented by women. Hey (1986) considered these gendered spatial configurations discriminatory to women and indicative of a prevailing misogyny which was dismissive of women’s rights to leisure in the public house on the same terms as men. Though not without weight, such an interpretation does downplay the importance of the social bonds which women forged in these spaces. Moreover, time in the pub could also represent precious respite from domestic burdens. Among the key drinks consumed were beer and stout, usually in the form of Guinness, with a strong preference for halfpint glasses, given the masculine associations of full pint vessels. Competitive drinking was generally eschewed, and while drunkenness was not unknown, in general terms, consumption tended to be more moderate. Of central appeal for many women was the sociable camaraderie of the pub: patronage of the lounge and snug offered valued opportunities to forge and consolidate affective bonds and social ties linking family, friends, and community (Davies 1992: 66–7). Shaped partly by imperial legacies and the cultural experiences of migrant communities, the gendering of space was also integral within Australian pubs. Although more accepted during the colonial period, by the early 1900s, women’s public drinking was increasingly seen as disreputable. Particular anxiety was raised about all-women drinking groups and unaccompanied females. Crucially, women were excluded from the main drinking bars. Given the cultures of egalitarianism and mateship seen as all-pervasive within these spaces,

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and identified as particularly Australian, this gendered restriction was all the more striking (Kirkby 2006). Indeed, frustration with this double standard would lead Australian feminists in the 1960s and 1970s to protest publically against sexual discrimination in the pub (Fitzgerald and Jordan 2009). Notwithstanding these spatial divisions, however, as in England, for many women pub patronage could form a valued aspect of everyday life. Wright (2003) has explored evidence of sociable gatherings in local pubs, where women would not only enjoy a drink or two, but also complete domestic tasks like shelling beans, all the while looking after their children. Moreover, that these activities often took place during the day, when men were typically at work, signaled the ways in which women’s pub patronage might occupy different times to men’s. While this could be interpreted as evidence of the dominance of normative cultures of male consumption, it is important not to downplay the vitality and significance of women’s drinking cultures as a means of sustaining networks of feminine sociability.

Mixed-Gender Drinking and Sexualities While separate spaces for men’s and women’s drinking were common in many drinking cultures across different geographic and temporal settings, mixed-gender drinking was also widespread. Whether as couples or in groups, men and women drinking together could provoke a range of reactions. Attitudes toward mixed company were molded to a significant extent by the relationship between drinkers: middle-aged married couples invoked often very different reactions to groups of young men and women previously unknown to each other, but whose recreation inclined toward sexualized sociability. Thus, in many cultural settings, attitudes toward mixed drinking were framed by prevailing norms of respectability regarding sociability among established couples. In England mixed drinking formed an important part of public house culture. Its chief spatial setting was the lounge, commonly held to be the most salubrious room in the pub. Especially in the years after the Great War, its material culture helped to create an atmosphere of comparative refinement, with comfortable seating and decorative features like plants and ornaments. In contrast with the main bar, sitting rather than standing was the norm. Conversation was key, but in many lounges music and singing proved a popular draw, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. With many lounges possessed of a piano, communal sing-songs helped create a convivial setting where affective ties would be sustained and developed between couples and among wider social groups. For husband and wife a trip to their local pub represented a chance for recreation away from the demands of work and home life, and was often a much valued treat (Moss 2014. See also Powers 2006 for American parallels). In this context, codes of masculine conduct differed sometimes significantly from the emphasis on manly bravado that could shape the culture of the main bar. There was a common expectation that when in female company a man’s drinking would be more moderate. For women mixed drinking cultures were shaped by gendered norms of feminine sociability. The presence of a male companion, especially a husband, was often regarded as a legitimizing influence, rendering a woman’s patronage of licensed premises less transgressive than might otherwise be the case, and thus underscoring normative codes of respectability. For both sexes, then, mixed drinking could reconfigure expectations of behavior and reshape ideals of gendered conduct.

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Figure 6.4  Patrons of The Crown public house, London, 1947. Patrons celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) and Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh, November 20, 1947. From Picture Post, no. 4437, “The Crown Celebrates,” 1947. Photograph by Bert Hardy/Stringer, Hulton Royals Collection via Getty Images.

Recognizing the appeal of lounge-based sociability, the interwar English drink trade ­ eveloped new kinds of public house where heterosocial drinking was more dominant. d Crucially, there was no distinct gendering of different bars, but rather an overall emphasis on mixed sociability. New architectural styles emphasized the importance of comfortable bars and rooms, often with table service, food, and musical entertainment. “Improved pubs,” as they were known, helped to broaden the social respectability accorded to female public drinking, with many women happy to enter new-style premises with their sweetheart or husband, having previously avoided less salubrious premises, as typified by Victorian and Edwardian urban pubs where women had been conventionally segregated away from the main bar. There was an emphasis on family recreation, with many venues welcoming of couples with children. In many cases, new venues helped broaden the appeal of the pub to more affluent, middle-class consumers, who were often enticed by the ambiance of attractive premises and the moderate drinking which prevailed (Gutzke 2005). These venues afforded women drinkers opportunities to experience public drinking cultures which were broadly considered not to compromise their respectability, but rather connected them in new ways to the significant expansion of women’s recreational culture between the two world wars, and offered both women and men new opportunities to share in companionate leisure. Mixed drinking cultures in America flourished from the 1920s, having developed in important directions during Prohibition, with illegal speakeasies becoming known as venues where men and women could socialize together. While the term “speakeasy” could refer to premises including small, scruffy basement bars, it often connoted lounge bars featuring musical entertainment and an emphatically “modern” atmosphere. Drawn partly by this fashionable

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setting, as Phillips has maintained, “speakeasies attracted middle- and upper-class women who would never have stepped into a saloon for fear of compromising their reputations” (2014: 266). Even notwithstanding the illegality of the speakeasy itself, there was often little impediment against mixed drinking; indeed, in many venues, the shared leisure between men and women helped cultivate a sexualized atmosphere. In an age when new forms of mass culture, such as the cinema, were often characterized by shared leisure between the sexes, the speakeasy and the lounge bar were seen by many as stylish settings for mixed sociability, markedly different to the nineteenth-century working-man’s saloon. It was not surprising that in the era after Prohibition the culture of the speakeasy was set to expand through the development of lounge bars. It is notable that mixed social drinking became normalized as older cultural scripts from the Prohibition era and earlier were subject to greater challenge. Gendered norms which emphasized prevailing archetypes of feminine temperance and masculine drunken pathology were contested by emergent cultures of heterosocial drinking. Cocktails became de rigueur for both men and women, their popularity bolstered via glamorous depiction in Hollywood movies. The private cocktail party became an important feature of domestic entertaining in the 1920s, and helped to ensure the demand for commercialized (if illegal) venues during Prohibition. With the addition of ingredients like sugar, soda water, fruit juice, and garnishes, the cocktail did much to tame hard liquor, obviously in terms of taste, but also with regards to social reputation. This could be especially important for women: many who would never consume straight gin, for instance, would have no qualms about ordering a dry martini. In the context of the lounge bar, emergent codes of femininity condoned and encouraged alcohol consumption as indicative of social and sexual liberation, with engagement with other cultural forms, such as the jazz music often played by bars’ resident bands, lending further corroborative effect (Rotskoff 2002). In terms of gendered conduct, there was a transgressive edge to cocktail culture, shaped partly by formative associations with the speakeasy, but also as a result of the lounge bar’s reputation as a site of socially liberated modernity. The presence of women was perceived not as an emasculating encroachment on masculine drinking cultures, but often rather as opportunity for the expression of male social and sexuality authority. Added to other manly ideals about the importance of holding one’s liquor and engaging in conversation and banter, the lounge proved a popular social setting with many men. Overall, these bars became influential sites of mixed drinking and contributed notably to the development of gendered cultures of alcohol consumption in the mid-twentieth century. Mixed-gender drinking cultures have long been associated with sexuality, as historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have noted. Drinking practices have offered socially normalized rituals for individuals to engage in flirtation with the hope of winning sexual attention, while alcohol itself has long been associated with aphrodisiac properties, at least in smaller quantities (Heath 2003: 34). A general—though by no means uncontested—trend toward greater acceptance of women drinkers in the early to mid-twentieth century ushered in new social habits. In England, by the Second World War, some socially confident young women began to seek out pubs in groups, sometimes with the hope of finding potential boyfriends. The development of these cultures helped to foster growing acceptance of women drinkers in pubs, as Langhamer (2003) has noted. Though met with social critique by those still concerned by female presence in licensed premises, for some young women

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Figure 6.5  Men and women drinking and dining in the cocktail lounge, 1944. Photograph by Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

the pub became an important place to meet potential suitors. Typically, those most inclined to this kind of pub-going were those who had experienced greater social and economic freedoms in wartime, often as a result of war work and wage-earning, and there emerged an increased willingness among young women to associate pub-going with socially acceptable courtship practices akin, say, to patronizing dance halls and cinemas. In turn, and perhaps not surprisingly, these greater numbers of women were welcomed by many male patrons, leading to an expansion of masculine competition for female attention. More broadly this greater sense of social liberation connected with drinking was witnessed in widely differing social settings during this period: in Northeast China fashionable young women sometimes celebrated intoxication as a fun experience linked to socializing with men (Smith 2012: 58). At times, however, interaction between the sexes was contested, and while normalized courtship practices were typically accepted and encouraged, casual sexualized encounters often ignited moral anxiety. Anxious to discourage any hint of lewd immorality, in many instances regulatory authorities and bar owners promoted respectability and sexual propriety, including through the control of spaces occupied by drinkers within premises. Writing on gendered drinking cultures in Canada in the 1930s, Malleck (2012) has explored the wide-ranging debate about women’s drinking in post-Prohibition Vancouver, including particular anxieties about lone female drinkers. Unaccompanied single women were perceived by anti-drink commentators as a social and moral liability, prompting arguments in favor of prohibiting women altogether from entry to licensed premises, or requiring women drinkers to have a male companion. Concerns emerged that licensing authorities

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must protect young women from the attentions of unscrupulous men, but perhaps still more  striking were the anxieties that young women were themselves prone to seducing men. Disquiet was raised about socially emancipated young women, often characterized as “flappers” whose propensity toward drinking, smoking, and sexual expression was thought by numerous social commentators to be morally degenerate. Juxtaposed against these fears, however, was a widespread demand that women should be permitted to consume alcohol publicly. Faced with these contrasting arguments, the Liquor Board of Ontario concluded that the interests of all concerned would be best met through the establishment of ladies’ “beverage rooms” where male companions were permitted, but managers were mandated to differentiate these spaces from the main drinking rooms associated with male customers. Particular emphasis was placed on the role of staff: any hint of sexual impropriety would be quashed by vigilant staff (including women), thus consolidating the norms of morally upright femininity the Board wished to inculcate and promote (Malleck 2012). Across varied locations and time periods, particular opprobrium was reserved for prostitutes, whose engagement in commercialized transactions was widely seen as distinct from other types of casualized sexual encounter sometimes found in bars. For many, especially in the context of more anonymous urban premises, the relaxed atmosphere and relative social freedoms of drinking venues afforded opportunities for prostitutes to find clients and vice versa. Some proprietors were willing to turn a blind eye. Indeed, as Harrison has noted, especially in impoverished urban communities in Victorian England, some licensees were “as ready to cater for this local need as for any other” (1971: 50). By contrast, however, there often existed strident resistance to the presence of known prostitutes, even if they entered premises with the intention of purchasing drinks, rather than solicitation per se. In the second half of the nineteenth century, temperance reformers aired moral critique about the purported close ties between slum pubs and prostitution in the Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh (Cooke 2015: 127). In many cases, prostitution aroused fears of social contagion and moral breakdown, with blame directed typically toward prostitutes, rather than their clients. Given the considerable stigma around prostitution, as well as the statutory obligation to uphold relevant laws, many landlords were at pains to distance themselves from even the faintest association with solicitation for fear of losing their license. Yet notwithstanding these regulatory policies and although precise figures are impossible to obtain, historians have argued that professional prostitution was significantly less common than causal non-commercialized encounters. Historians have asserted that moral campaigners often over-stated the extent of the problem: for instance, Harrison (1971: 50) asserted that “temperance reformers often saw prostitution where none existed,” while Powers (1998: 34–5) has observed that the presence of prostitutes was typically a rare occurrence in most nineteenth-century American saloons. Alongside dominant norms linked to heterosexuality, homosexual drinking cultures were a less prevalent, but certainly significant, cultural influence. In a range of ways, queer social codes and practices contested, rejected, or reconfigured dominant norms of masculinity and femininity, as well as sexuality. While cultures of all-male and, to a lesser extent, all-female drinking were socially accepted, in the context of same-sex attraction, these gendered habits could provoke acute moral and social consternation. In many countries, male homosexuality was criminalized, while homosexuality among both genders often stoked considerable disquiet. It followed that associations with liquor were potentially

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perilous, especially when framed in the context of alcohol’s alleged aphrodisiac properties, and its broader effects in lowering social inhibitions. Legal restriction and cultural marginalization notwithstanding, queer venues could play a notable role within the drinking culture of a particular town or city. For patrons, the appeal of the bar was rooted partly in familiar factors: sociability forged by communal drinking practices, the development of friendship and community networks, as well as the appeal of alcohol itself. However, for many their choice of venue was dominated by the prevailing social acceptance of homosexual identities and experiences. The existence of such venues had a liberating and transformative impact on individuals who otherwise lacked spaces where they might express their sexual identity. As Boyd has argued, the queer bar “legitimized a space where it was not shameful or an insult to assume others were gay,” which in turn “facilitated the development of a shared public culture, a new language and lexicon of sexual meanings” (2003: 61). In the main, queer drinking cultures were associated with urban recreation. Large cities in particular often had at least a handful of premises patronized by queer men and women. Often venues catered to either men or women, although this was not universal. In exploring the history of queer bars and taverns in San Francisco in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boyd has pointed to the social significance of particular bars known for their male homosexual clientele. Queer venues were located mainly in

Figure 6.6  Pacific Street, San Francisco, California, c. 1930s. View along Pacific Street, featuring the Barbary Coast club, the unofficial flagship of the area that also featured numerous other clubs and bars. Other famous nightspots visible on the strip are Bee & Ray Gorman’s Gay 90s, the House of Blue Lights, and Pago Pago. Photograph by Frederic Lewis via Getty Images.

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the infamous Barbary Coast district, where prostitution thrived alongside often salacious ­vaudeville theaters and nightclubs, and as such they contributed to a transgressive local culture. Though often marginalized, including as the object of temperance and social reform critique, queer drinking cultures occupied a significant and much valued place in the everyday lives of some San Francisco residents (Boyd 2003). Writing on male homosexuality in the early to mid-twentieth century, Houlbrook (2005) has considered the role of the London public house as a site for the development of queer social networks. A small minority of pubs were known for their queer clientele, including several in Soho, a district long associated with licentiousness. Particular venues in central locations were known for a diverse range of patrons ranging from troops on leave and laborers to clerks and professionals. Redolent of a certain cultural knowingness about the navigation of the metropolitan landscape, awareness of the existence and location of these venues could be highly prized among those for whom acknowledgment of their sexual identity would have been unconscionable in other social settings. In terms of attitudes among proprietors, since male homosexuality remained criminalized until 1967 in England, it is clear that some publicans were prepared to show a significant degree of toleration, even though this meant risking their license. Licensees negotiated a “precarious balance between the market and the state. Most took men’s money while seeking to minimize the dangers, carefully policing their behavior in order to ensure their premises could never be deemed ‘disorderly’” (Houlbrook 2005: 81–2). Here questions emerged as to the extent to which practices of open “cruising” for sex were tolerated: certainly in many cases, landlords were more willing to accept less overt behavior from their customers. While female homosexuality was not criminalized in many societies, it did provoke considerable cultural anxiety, with same-sex attraction among women often seen as morally degenerate. Within this context, the existence of lesbian bars and pubs was all the more significant. Writing on early to mid-twentieth century American history, Faderman has underlined the importance of such venues. Especially for young working-class lesbians, who were often “without their own comfortable domiciles in which to receive their friends,” bars became important sites of sociability and camaraderie (Faderman 1992: 161). Patrons experienced queer bars as sites of social liberation, free from some of the cultural restrictions that regulated women’s experience of normative heterosexual drinking cultures: for instance, customers would often arrive singly and purchase their own drinks, in a contrast with androcentric cultures which often emphasized the importance of male companions. The transgressive nature of lesbian bars forged cultures of social independence for women, and as such their presence was much valued by many. By the early twentieth century, similar venues were established in England in major towns and cities. Jennings has argued that while lesbian bar culture developed more fully in the era after the Second World War, it had important roots reaching back earlier in the century. Though few in number, both London and Manchester possessed lesbian pubs and bars. Among the most significant was the Gateways Club, a private bar and club, which was to play a key role in forging London’s lesbian cultural life in the mid-twentieth century, including through its vital role as a space for women to forge social bonds and explore sexual identities and relationships (Rebecca Jennings 2007: 113). While dominant social codes of masculinity and femininity were crucial to the cultural practices of “mainstream” bar and pub life, in those premises associated with queer and

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lesbian communities, social norms afforded opportunities to experience social and sexual cultures not readily visible in other social settings. A range of historians writing on queer and lesbian bars in this period, but especially the early to mid-twentieth century, have pointed to their crucial role in helping to forge and sustain community identity and solidarity—solidarity which was central to the demands for gay and lesbian rights pursued later in the century (Boyd 2003: 62). While caution against a teleological narrative of progressive social liberation is appropriate, it is evident at least that for many men and women, patronage of bars and pubs played an important role in their socio-sexual lives.

Conclusions Participation in and indeed critique of drinking cultures were both constitutive and reflective of masculinity and femininity. Drinking venues were influential social sites where gendered and sexual identities could be formed and contested in a public arena. Experiences and representations of gender formed part of an interlinked matrix of factors which shaped drinking cultures, including class, race, age, income, generation, and geographical setting. While gender cannot be singled out as an overriding influence, its significance should not be underestimated, for masculinity and femininity were notable cultural forces in shaping consumption habits. Throughout the period 1850–1950 attitudes toward, and experiences of, gendered drinking cultures were both molded by and contributed to broader societal developments. In an era of colossal change wrought by industrialization, imperialism, and warfare, ideals of masculinity and femininity were characterized by both marked continuity with entrenched norms and the emergence of new cultural discourses and practices. Particularly in the context of commercialized public settings, drinking was often conceptualized as a normatively masculine practice. Men’s drinking often encompassed social habits which fostered the cultivation and expression of masculinity, including friendly competition between drinkers in the context of barroom lore, and the notable (though by no means universal) social acceptance of male drunkenness as evidence of virile masculinity. In contrast with men’s drinking, attitudes to women’s alcohol consumption in various counties and across many social settings were subject to wider and more significant contestation and change over the period 1850–1950. In broad terms, during the early to mid-twentieth century, established ideals of temperate femininity were contrasted with a broadening social acceptance of women’s public drinking. Predictably the increased presence of female consumers in public drinking spaces had an impact on men’s drinking habits: in some respects there was greater opportunity for interaction with the opposite sex, but there remained an emphasis on homosocial drinking practices as an expression of masculinity. Contrasting with normative cultural habits, within queer drinking cultures the bar became much valued as a space for the expression of sexual identities often marginalized and in many cases criminalized within “mainstream” cultures. It followed, then, that bars and pubs were often important spaces where cultural practices could have significant wider social and political impact. As the second half of the twentieth century advanced, many of the gendered drinking cultures prevalent prior to 1950 retained a notable degree of cultural resonance across diverse geographical settings. In many ways, men’s drinking continued to be regarded as less socially problematic than women’s, while critiques of female inebriation were often

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articulated in terms that echoed and invoked the ideals of temperate femininity that had prevailed in the nineteenth century. Alongside this, however, can be seen the ways in which many of the social impediments against women’s presence in drinking venues still in force after the Second World War have been eroded toward the end of the twentieth century and into twentieth-first. In sum, gendered drinking has long been and remains a complex and contested practice, both molded by, and contributing to, cultural codes of alcohol consumption, and broader social norms of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality.

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7

RELIGION AND IDEOLOGY PAUL TOWNEND AND DEBORAH TONER

Introduction Temperance movements have dominated scholarship examining the relationship between alcohol, religion, and ideology in the age of industry, empire, and war, not only in the United States, home to arguably the most powerful and successful temperance movement, but also in Britain, parts of Europe, and the wider world. Various religious and secular ideologies shaped the emergence and development of temperance ideas, but temperance itself became an influential ideological force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Temperance matured from an eclectic set of reform ideas in the early nineteenth century into, by mid-century, a coherent and effective ideology that generated and sustained a series of interrelated, unprecedentedly successful social movements involving millions of participants, particularly in the rapidly evolving English-speaking Atlantic World. Between 1850 and 1950, nationally specific, aggressive, and assertive temperance movements, underpinned by a widely shared critique of alcohol’s place in society, sought cultural transformation through the radical curtailment of alcohol production and consumption. Temperance’s mobilizing rhetoric of national and self-improvement was potent, and temperance ideology became an ideal partner for broader causes that sought social transformations and realignments, such as anti-slavery and the women’s movement in North America, nationalism in parts of Europe, and international workers’ movements. This chapter firstly outlines how various Christian and secular influences shaped the emergence of the temperance movement in the early nineteenth century and its development across different contexts throughout the period. Enlightenment and republican ideals about rationality intersected with Protestant evangelical ideas in the early temperance movement and, although these remained dominant, non-Protestant religions engaged with temperance to varying degrees as well. Secondly, the chapter examines in more detail the composition and operation of temperance itself as an influential ideology of the period. Despite differences of emphasis within and across temperance movements in different national and international contexts, several core ideas were broadly shared. These included the ideas that: alcohol was at the root of moral corruption in society; the family was the key battleground in the war against alcohol and women especially had key roles in temperance discourse and activism; alcohol consumption was a problem spiraling out of control especially in urbanizing, industrializing areas; and Christian churches and organized political action were needed to redress the problems caused by alcohol. Finally, we examine the intersections between temperance and broader ideological trends of the age of industry, empire, and war, including socialism, nationalism, and

colonialism, and consider how some disenfranchised groups engaged with temperance to advance their own interests within or against these broad ideological forces.

Christian and Secular Influences on the Development of Temperance While early temperance reformers typically organized local societies, they imagined wider reform and produced a body of widely shared and effectively networked propaganda while working in concert, sharing ideas, strategies, and approaches. The ideology of temperance evolved, moreover, in relation to rapid and disruptive social change across the Atlantic World. These changes included rapid population growth, urbanization, and mass migration; associated economic evolution; and the rapid development and integration of populations into market economies. These developments transformed broad patterns of trade, production, and consumption, none more dramatically than those related to alcohol, as outlined elsewhere in this volume. The nineteenth century was marked by rapidly rising social anxiety about alcohol consumption, widely associated with population increase, alongside a growth in the number of the poor, and growing fear of public disorder, particularly in urban areas that served as hubs for commerce and the production of a simultaneously bourgeoning print culture (Phillips 2014: 155–91; Yeomans 2014: 35–48; Pilcher 2015: 157–63). Early temperance ideology developed in dynamic and symbiotic relationship to these transformations and the anxieties they engendered. Articulated with growing urgency by a diverse group of influential advocates in the United States, especially American educator Anthony Benezet, physician Benjamin Rush, and Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, temperance had both Christian and secular influences (Bernard 1993: 9–31). This was a pattern repeated beyond the United States, especially in Britain, Canada, and Scandinavia (Tyrrell 1991: 16–17; Heron 2003: 52–6). Early influential advocates of temperance, such as Rev. Justin Edwards in Massachusetts and Rev. John Edgar in Ulster, preached individual transformation through association and pledging, in dramatic language decrying the overwhelming and devastating social consequences of drink, and demanding public witness in favor of temperance as a crucial means of influencing private behavior. Activists oriented their discourse around a radically rational, medical, and/or Christian response to the perception of escalating production, destabilized patterns of consumption, disorder, and other disruptive social consequences of change. Early temperance, directed primarily against spirit-drinking but also public drunkenness and private intoxication, urged personal restraint among drinkers, supported by voluntary association and public pledging. This widely shared transatlantic public discourse and portable modular approach to the practice of a new form of temperance fostered active attachment both to rule-based and loosely affiliated temperance societies marked by public demonstrations of personal transformation (Heron 2003: 53–5; Allen 2011: 377; Yeomans 2014: 47–8). The relationship of Christianity to developing temperance movements and the contribution of Christian churches and doctrine to temperance ideology was complex. The early articulation of temperance principles derived from a powerful fusion of Enlightenment-era anxiety about the erosion of rationality many associated with rising spirit consumption, with influential “New Light,” Wesleyan, and evangelical notions of the perfectibility of Christian practice. Elements of Enlightenment philosophy defined civilization and progress by the increasing domination of reason and rationality in politics, economics, society, and culture,

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over irrationality, passion, and vice, the latter deriving from natural corporeal desires. The rational being, and particularly the rational citizen in newly emerging republics, should be able to control and overcome temptations to vice, including drunkenness, indolence, gambling, and excess of various kinds. This ability distinguished the enlightened citizen from “savages” living in a state of nature, unruly plebeians, and profligate aristocrats alike. Eighteenth-century French philosophes, for instance, denounced the Carnival and other popular festivals as “occasions of drunkenness, debauchery, and unrestrained impulses,” while in nineteenth-century Britain popular recreations like fairs and wakes were denounced as “superfluous and disorderly” and spending money on alcohol decried as irrational and wasteful (Harrison 1994: 49; Baecque 1997: 247; Yeomans 2014: 52–3). In the United States, Benjamin Rush cautioned that allowing drunkenness to go unchecked meant that “intemperate and corrupted voters,” and not virtuous citizens, would choose the republic’s leaders, culminating in demagoguery and political ruin (Lender and Martin 1987: 38). Even in Mexico, without a formal temperance movement until the twentieth century, habitual drunkenness was cited as grounds for the suspension or permanent removal of citizenship rights in constitutional documents of the mid-nineteenth century (Toner 2015a: 159–60). Protestantism, particularly rapidly developing evangelicalism in a variety of manifestations, including unconventional religious revivals and “awakenings,” likewise exerted powerful influences over the early development of the temperance movement. Presbyterian, Calvinist, Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist, Anglican, and evangelical ministers led multifaceted campaigns to spread the message of temperance in the north-eastern United States amidst the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century. Activities included sermonizing about temperance, exhorting employers to cease offering liquor rations to their workers, organizing public meetings and parades, printing and distributing temperance literature, and barring alcohol from any church functions. In Britain and British North America, temperance was also promoted by numerous non-conformist Protestant churches. These faiths stressed the need for self-discipline, asceticism, and a strong work ethic, all of which were deemed to deteriorate under the influence of drink (Lender and Martin 1987: 67–9; Heron 2003: 58–9; Allen 2011: 375; Yeomans 2014: 44, 52–3; Pilcher 2015: 169). Evangelical beliefs offered fertile and enduring influences over anti-alcohol activities throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and throughout the world. Evangelical support for the temperance cause in the US South increased after the abolition of slavery, partly as a means of containing what many saw as the social threat posed by the availability of alcohol to former slaves and the moral contagion this could engender amongst the rest of the population (Pilcher 2015: 170). Individual salvation, evangelicals believed, rested on one’s choice to accept God’s freely given grace; while conversion was first necessary for a moral life to become possible, exposure to temptation and bad influence could impede conversion and might even lead the righteous back to a life of sin. Such theological ideas often combined with a range of medical and social arguments against alcohol, as was common to the operation of temperance since its origins. As one North Carolina preacher argued in 1905, Alcohol undermines the health, enfeebles the will, makes the mind coarse and the tongue vulgar, brings discord to the family, deprives children of their rights, lowers the standards of morals, corrupts politics, fills prisons and asylums with human wrecks, mocks religion and ruins immortal souls. (Lewis 2009: 44–5)

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Baptists and Methodists involved in running the Anti-Saloon League of Virginia in the early 1900s likewise viewed drunkenness as a “barrier to conversion” in and of itself, “because the inebriated mind could not properly acknowledge the role of Christ as savior,” but also as a cause of broader family and societal breakdown (Mathews 2009: 251–3). Since drunkenness was itself a sin, but could furthermore engender all manner of other moral crimes, southern evangelicals pursued a series of measures that progressively removed alcohol and drinkers from public space. These measures included laws against being drunk in, or bringing liquor into, religious spaces; no-license areas for saloons up to five miles around churches, schools, and civic spaces; liquor dispensaries to eliminate pleasurable sociability from the sale of alcohol; and, by the early twentieth century, state-wide prohibition laws (Lewis 2009: 46–53). Evangelical beliefs about drunkenness being an obstacle to conversion also meant that Protestant missionaries helped to spread temperance ideas around the world. In Britain and across its developing global empire, missionary work was often supported by temperance-oriented organizations such as the British and Foreign Temperance Society, the Anglo-Indian Temperance Association, the Good Templars, and the Bands of Hope (Thorne 2006: 144). Many members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, formed in 1811, were founding members of the American Temperance Society a decade later (Tyrrell 1991: 12–13). Protestant missionaries helped the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union establish branches in Australia, Japan, Italy, Sweden, and parts of Africa by the end of the nineteenth century (Pilcher 2015: 170–1). As Ian Tyrrell has explored in relation to the WCTU’s international activity, two main aspects of evangelical belief drove international anti-alcohol work by Protestant missionaries and the WCTU. First, Christian perfectionism held that while “justification by faith absolved believers of their sin; sanctification was a second stage in the conversion process.” Sanctification required individuals to pursue perfection by adhering to exemplary moral standards, eschewing alcohol and all such other earthly temptations that would lead them back to sinful ways. Second, this quest for perfectionism became particularly urgent in overseas missionary work when combined with millennialism, the belief that Christ’s second coming would establish a thousand-year kingdom on earth before the final judgment. Many involved in international temperance believed that achieving “earthly purification” through moral and social reform was necessary before Christ’s kingdom could be established. While the sought-after reforms encompassed a wide variety of issues beyond the scope of temperance, alcohol was generally viewed as “the central agent of evil” with “its capacity to loosen inhibitions and to encourage ‘immoral’ behavior” (Tyrrell 1991: 22–4. See also Marshall and Marshall 1976: 136, 148–66; Grimshaw 1998: 201–2; Allen 2011: 376). Temperance was eventually taken up with enthusiasm by many but not all Christian evangelicals across most Protestant denominations. In some ways, however, Christian doctrine also restrained temperance activity and ideology by sustaining longstanding denominational and scriptural traditions endorsing moderation and (often) sacramental use of wine. In its most effective early populist forms after the 1830s—the Preston Temperance Society and then teetotal Chartism in Britain; the Washingtonian Movement and affiliated societies in the United States; and Father Theobald Mathew’s Cork Total Abstinence Society in Ireland, which incorporated something approaching half the adult population by 1842—the temperance movement rapidly became in practice “teetotal,” rejecting the use of alcohol in any form,

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while occasionally still allowing a “sacramental exception” (Lender and Martin 1987: 70–7; Heron 2003: 54; Yeomans 2014: 50–2). In other cases, some theological c ­ ontortionism was employed to square this circle. Some Christian teetotalers developed the “two-wine theory,” for instance, to account for some positive biblical references to wine as the justification for their own total rejection of alcohol. According to this theory, positive references to wine drinking, such as at the wedding at Cana, really referred to unfermented grape juice, while other stories detailing the deleterious effects of wine consumption, such as the incestuous acts of Lot, referred to fermented wine. Some Methodist churches adopted the use of grape juice in place of wine in the communion ceremony as a result of this line of argument (Phillips 2014: 213). Despite widespread participation by members of many congregations and the adoption of temperance principles by many Christian clergy, temperance could be divisive within individual churches and across denominational traditions. After 1850 in many settings but especially in the United States, temperance ideology hardened and sought social change through sustained reform efforts designed to undercut the economic and political influence of the “alcohol interest,” generating an escalating set of political demands for stricter or prohibitive licensing laws for the purchase and sale of alcohol, such as the prohibitionist “Maine Law” of 1851. This raised serious questions about the relationship between alcohol, church, and state that divided Christian denominations, even as they ostensibly worked together in support of the temperance cause. Mary Beth Mathews’ study of the Anti-Saloon League of Virginia, for instance, shows that although Baptists and Methodists presented a mostly united public front in support of this organization’s campaign for local-option and state-wide prohibitions, this belied real divisions. Methodist clergy and lay members enthusiastically endorsed the ASLV’s campaigns, giving temperance sermons, making financial donations, coordinating voters’ support, and drafting the enabling legislation for state-wide prohibition. Baptists were uncomfortable with these coordinated, interventionist methods that went against their beliefs about a stricter separation of church and state, the principle devotion of a church to its local congregation, and the individual’s spiritual conversion and moral reform. Methodists’ Arminian theological influences meant that they conceived of social reform movements as helping to “propel the sinner closer to God … to help others to help themselves towards salvation,” and thus legislation that effectively forced individuals to avoid alcohol was not only compatible with their beliefs, but desirable and necessary. Baptists, meanwhile, had a strong Calvinist influence that placed greater emphasis on individual salvation through God’s grace, which meant that their support for social reform movements like temperance allowed for encouraging “the individual to amend his or her ways,” but forcing changes on the individual could be counterproductive (Mathews 2009: 253–5, 262, 272–3). Notwithstanding such differences in approach, it is clear that the nineteenth century saw a major alignment between temperance, typically in the radical form of total abstinence, and evangelical, perfectionistically inclined Protestantism.1 Catholic theology offered considerably less grounds for any complete rejection of alcohol, and with some notable exceptions in Ireland and the Irish diaspora in the United States and Australia, temperance made comparatively little headway in Catholic communities. Ireland’s most important temperance campaign was led by the Capuchin Father Theobold Mathew, who became president of the Cork Total Abstinence Society in 1838. In less than a year, he had attracted over 9,000

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pledged members, compared to 2,000 in all the other local temperance organizations (mostly of elitist and Protestant membership) combined. Conducting tours around the Irish countryside, giving sermons, and administering teetotal pledges to new members—often to tens of thousands in a matter of days—Father Mathew’s campaign became a mass movement. It primarily attracted the “self-improving working classes,” and claimed to have 5 million members by mid-1841. While these numbers are probably exaggerated, historians agree that Father Mathew led a hugely popular movement amongst Irish Catholics, without comparable precedent or successor. This is demonstrated not just by contemporary estimates of pledged members numbering in the millions and accounting for up to half of Ireland’s adult population, but also by dramatic reductions in whiskey sales, beer production, and spirits retailers between 1838 and 1840 (Quinn 2002: 57–78; Malcolm 2003: 323; Allen 2011: 380). While Father Mathew’s movement petered out almost as dramatically as it had started, temperance did not disappear from the Irish Catholic Church’s agenda. Indeed, in the 1890s a Jesuit Father James Cullen established the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart in Dublin, which drew a closer link between total abstinence and Catholic theology than the earlier movement. Influenced by the “Devotional Revolution” of Irish Catholicism, which called for an “increasingly puritanical” approach to morality, stricter discipline, and “elaborate devotions,” the Pioneers promoted abstinence as an expression of piety and penance, and as a practice that might atone for the drink-inspired sins of others. It rapidly attracted

Figure 7.1  Total Abstinence Society pledge card, 1845. Engraving by The Very Reverend T. Mathew, President, Robert T. Hallow. Image by The New York Historical Society via Getty Images.

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a large membership, which continued to grow until the mid-twentieth century, reaching a peak of half a million members by 1960, at a time when the Irish population was only 3 million and most temperance organizations internationally had ceased to exert meaningful influence (Malcolm 2003: 323). Elsewhere, Catholic temperance organizations owed their popularity to broader social agendas, especially the assimilation of Irish immigrant populations, rather than to the specifics of Catholic theology. In mid-nineteenth-century Australia, for instance, the St Patrick’s Total Abstinence Society became the largest Catholic organization besides the Church itself in the city of Sydney, and overshadowed Protestant temperance organizations there in terms of its membership and public activity, to the extent that Protestant leaders feared its power. Influential Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang wrote in 1847 that the Catholic temperance movement had “become a mere device for exhibiting the physical force of the Irish Roman Catholics of Sydney and Melbourne in ostentatious and frequent processions,” in a pamphlet decrying the influence of “Popery in Australia.” However, Matthew Allen has argued that for the Catholic leaders and members of this organization, the SPTAS was principally a means of asserting the respectability of Irish Catholics, rejecting negative stereotypes about drunken Irish criminality that had built up in New South Wales in the 1830s, and demonstrating “allegiance to the dominant ideology of moral enlightenment … with its concern for the improvement of man as an individual and society as a whole” (2011: 376–7, 382–91). Several scholars have also shown the central motivating principle of countering pejorative stereotypes about Irish drunkenness within Catholic temperance organizations in the United States. The first leader of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union, established in 1872, stated its core aims were to “make all state and local societies ‘stronger and better’ and … do ‘away with a multitude of aspersions upon’ Catholicism” (Quinn 1996: 629. See also Walsh 1991: 70–1; Moloney 1998: 2–5; Phillips 2014: 195). The CTAU had approximately 90,000 members by the early twentieth century and more than 1,000 local branches, concentrated in northeast and mid-west urban centers, in cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburg. Father Mathew’s crusade in Ireland and his temperance tour of the United States in the 1840s provided some inspiration for the CTAU, which organized public parades and sober recreation activities and sponsored both the Father Mathew Chair in Psychology and Father Mathew lecture series on temperance during the inaugural years of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (Quinn 1996: 629, 632, 636–7; Moloney 1998: 5). Catholic temperance advocates did portray excessive drinking as a sin and sobriety as a necessary defense against a perceived growing hedonism of industrial society, and there was some Catholic support for prohibitionist legislation: for instance, Catholic Bishop John Ireland, “co-founded and served as a vice president” of the Anti-Saloon League from 1896 to 1901; Catholic clergy founded the Catholic Prohibition League of America; and laymen founded the Association of Catholics Favoring Prohibition, both in support of national prohibition (Walsh 1991: 70–1; Quinn 1996: 635, 638). However, the CTAU as a whole generally emphasized moral suasion approaches over prohibitionist legislation and actively sought to distance its image from what Irish Americans often viewed as the Puritan, humorless, self-denying ethos of the Protestant temperance activists. Instead, the CTAU framed temperance as a “self-help movement,” attended by sociable, fun-loving men seeking to “attain economic self-sufficiency and improve … family life by abstaining

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from alcohol” (Moloney 1998: 2, 5–6). This image was ultimately undermined by the introduction of nationwide prohibition, which alienated many Irish Catholics, and the influence of the CTAU was also undermined by an increasing lack of support from the Catholic hierarchy in Rome, which viewed the organization’s liberal acceptance of American democracy and the separation of church and state with suspicion. Together, these developments meant that Catholic temperance subsequently declined in the United States after its revival in the late nineteenth century, unlike the Pioneer-led resurgence in Ireland (Quinn 1996: 631–40). In early twentieth-century Russia, there was some support for temperance both within the Orthodox Church and from popular religious movements deemed un-Orthodox and even subversive. Father A. V. Rozhdestvenskii led the Society for the Spread of Religious and Moral Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church from the 1890s and established the Alexander Nevskii Temperance Society. Since the 1860s, temperance had formed part of the Church’s agenda of spreading the “inner mission,” which sought to foster a deeper spiritual engagement of the people to matters of faith, based on the idea that church-goers merely performed rituals out of habit or superstition rather than understanding their spiritual substance. Priests such as Rozhdestvenskii taught that drunkenness was a “vice that separated the individual from God and opened the door for other sins.” Although the Alexander Nevskii Temperance Society attracted over 70,000 members by 1906, most of the 1,800 temperance societies sponsored by the Orthodox Church by 1912 were very small with only ten to thirty members (McKee 1999: 223–5; Herlihy 2003: 75). One obstacle to the further spread of temperance ideas within the Orthodox Church was a widespread perception amongst both clergy and laypeople that sobriety and temperance were the preserve of sectarians. This perception accounts for the hostile reaction of the Orthodox Church toward some other temperance groups that did attract a mass following, despite being in broad agreement about the need to reform Russian drinking habits. The St Petersburg trezvenniki [sobrietarians], for instance, established by Ivan A. Churikov, a peasant tradesman, in the 1890s, attracted approximately 100,000 followers by 1911. The trezvenniki exhorted believers to take personal responsibility for the practice of faith and the achievement of holiness through good behavior. After taking part in an induction ritual committing themselves to sobriety, members discussed the experience as a sort of conversion, dividing up the narrative of their lives into before and after the acceptance of sobriety, which helped them to become more hard-working, virtuous, responsible family men. However, Churikov and other leading figures were persistently persecuted by the Orthodox Church hierarchy because of the challenge they posed to Church authority and their perceived radicalism, with Churikov being excommunicated in 1914 (McKee 1999: 212–20; 225–8; Herlihy 2003: 79–88). In a variety of contexts, then, Christianity played a major role in the development and spread of organized anti-alcohol movements around the world. Evangelical Protestantism had the most dominant and enduring relationship with temperance activism across the 1800 to 1950 period, but some non-Protestant denominations also sought to advance religious and social reform through temperance ideas. Questions about the relationship between alcohol, church, state, and the individual moved into the center of the social and political landscape in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries across the Atlantic World and beyond, with dramatic consequences for religious, political, and social institutions.

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Temperance Ideology Even while regional and national temperance movements evolved, temperance ideology had reached a mature state, at least in the Anglophone world, by the middle of the nineteenth century. The limited but sustained success of populist temperance movements and anti-alcohol efforts at legal and social reform reinforced the effective, systematic, and holistic promotion of anti-alcohol ideology. That core set of ideas changed little until the failure of national prohibition in the United States and the reinvigoration of the medical/disease model of alcohol addiction in the 1930s and 1940s, influenced by the research of Dwight Anderson and others. The dominant perspective of the 1850–1940 era was advanced initially by a host of well positioned supporters, such as the British Baptist minister Dawson Burns, British journalist Frederick Lees, American journalist and activist William Lloyd Garrison, physician Albert Day, and journalist/Methodist minister Wesley Bailey, among many others. Temperance tracts and dramatic platform rhetoric were richly supplemented, amplified, and popularized over time by extended pamphlets, histories of the movement, and heroic biographies of temperance activists. Pamphlets were produced by the hundreds, while advocates effectively propagandized across all available media platforms and produced a wide range of accompanying striking visualizations of the evils of drink, particularly in domestic settings. Temperance movements and campaigns waxed and waned over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, but the movement’s decentralized and nimble local structures benefitted enormously from a coherent set of widely shared core ideas and perspectives on

Figure 7.2  Plate II of George Cruikshank’s “The Bottle,” 1847. From a series of eight etchings depicting the effects of alcoholism. The caption reads: “He Is Discharged from His Employment for Drunkenness: They Pawn Their Clothes to Supply the Bottle.” Image by Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

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the alcohol problem that could be drawn upon to argue for social and legal change, be it dramatic or incremental. Local-optionists, state-level prohibitionists, and more radical advocates of national reformations alike could draw upon an accepted set of perspectives about the urgent need for action, and the difficulties to be anticipated in affecting it. While reason was often subordinated to emotional appeal in temperance propaganda, proponents of the cause agreed broadly on a range of important points, a consensus emphasized across a wide range of books, pamphlets, and tracts of varying degrees of sophistication. First, they agreed that alcohol was a, if not the, primary font of all moral corruption, social and individual. While some individuals were particularly susceptible or likely to be corrupted, all were vulnerable and the consequences of alcohol use were bad for all, particularly women and children. The family was the critical battlefield in the struggle against alcohol and the struggle against it was legitimately framed in emotional and moral terms in temperance movements around the world. Hugely popular temperance tales in the United States often followed formulaic narratives about formerly virtuous young men descending into destitution, violence, and death following their first temptation with alcohol (Reynolds and Rosenthal 1997: 3–4). Many temperance publications focused in grisly detail on domestic violence and the murders of wives by drunken husbands. Accounts of women being bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot frequently populated the pages of temperance newspapers, short stories, and novels (Martin 2008: 40–53). Themes of family destitution and moral breakdown also figured prominently in the slide shows, cartoons, and film reels used to striking effect by the Band of Hope children’s society

Figure 7.3  Plate VI of George Cruikshank’s “The Bottle,” 1847. From a series of eight etchings depicting the effects of alcoholism. The caption reads: “Fearful Quarrels, and Brutal Violence, Are the Natural Consequences of the Frequent Use of the Bottle.” Image by Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

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in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (McAllister 2012: 5–10). Workerdriven temperance organizations in France in the early twentieth century made use of the cinema to screen anti-alcohol films depicting women suffering familial oppression at the hands of drunken husbands, as well as workplace exploitation (Prestwich 1980: 48–51). The South African Temperance Alliance, formed in 1893, coordinated the efforts of international organizations as well as local churches, and advanced arguments about the detrimental effects of alcohol on the family, domestic relationships, and child health (Nugent 2011: 351). Moreover, because of their role in the family, women were essential advocates for necessary social change around the alcohol issue. Women were deemed more vulnerable to the essential degradations associated with alcohol use, both because female intoxication was less “natural” and more socially harmful, and because women and children suffered in particularly poignant (and propagandistically colorful!) ways from male degradation through alcohol abuse by both sons and fathers. The Prohibition Party in the United States, for instance, was the first political party to include women as party members and policy shapers because of their special, gendered affinity for the temperance cause. Together with the WCTU, with whom the Prohibition Party worked informally and formally in the 1880s, their campaigns emphasized the moral and family-oriented nature of women as uniquely placed to tackle what they saw as the deeply corrupt ties that joined together drinkers, saloons, and mainstream party politics (Andersen 2013: 61–93). Second, temperance advocates generally agreed that the consumption of alcohol was growing, and the increasingly industrial and impersonal nature of alcohol’s production, especially regarding spirits, was producing a pathological juncture of individual and market interests that threatened the developing social order in fundamental ways as interested parties exploited the alcohol trade and encouraged consumption. They argued that patterns of consumption endemic to contemporary societies were corrupting of individuals and offered a fundamental and nearly universal obstacle to both social and spiritual development. Historical evidence from the period 1850 to 1950, as discussed by James Kneale in this volume, shows that overall alcohol consumption rates actually decreased in many places, or were lower than in previous eras, yet there was a universal trend across European and North American temperance groups in perceiving alcohol abuse as an exponentially increasing problem amongst the industrial working classes. The increasingly obvious and widespread social difficulties associated with urbanization and industrialization were intimately bound up with this perception of widespread use and abuse of alcohol. As Rod Phillips has observed “Alcohol became the focal point of many anxieties, whether they concerned social and economic changes or shifts in values and behavior. It was held responsible for sickening or killing its consumers, for ruining families, and for causing behavior as varied as prostitution, suicide, insanity, and criminality” (2014: 173). Distilled drinks were singled out for censure in most places, being seen as particularly dangerous for their industrial, mass-produced, or synthetic origins, in contrast to more “natural” drinks like wine and beer. The case for prohibiting absinthe in Switzerland and France, for instance, was given a boost by the criminal case of Jean Lanfray, who murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1905. His trial focused on whether he had been driven to insanity and violence by absinthe consumption; the fact that he also regularly consumed up to six bottles of wine a day was not considered relevant, due to the still widely accepted view (at least in France) that wine was a natural, and therefore harmless, beverage (Phillips 2014: 181).

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Figure 7.4  “L’absinthe allegory,” 1883. An allegorical engraving on the dangers of absinthe, by M. G. Darré. From Le Monde Illustré. Image by David Nathan-Maister, Science and Society Picture Library via Getty Images.

Third, Christian churches and their congregants, as a matter of first importance to their own mission, needed to be enlisted as the primary institutions to counter the juncture of interest and human weakness that left alcohol, unchecked, at the center of social order. Moreover, collective political action, not mere individual self-improvement or voluntary association in “temperance societies,” was essential to reversing these developments. Alcohol interests needed to be checked by popular and elite pressure on the state and from the state; state power needed to be aligned with decreasing consumption. Increasingly,

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temperance campaigns combining religious, secular, and political bodies lobbied for ­state-led change regarding alcohol. The collection of state revenue from alcohol taxes and licensing often became the focus of their attacks. The Minnesota Radical, a newspaper of the United States’ Prohibition Party, in 1877 took issue with the Internal Revenue Act of 1862, governing the licensing of liquor sales, on these grounds. It argued the federal government had “become partners in the infamous business of drunkard making by receiving into the public treasury a portion of the blood money drawn from the pockets of the deluded and insane victims of the accursed traffic” (Andersen 2013: 14). The Anti-Saloon League, much more influential than the Prohibition Party, spread out from its base in grassroots Protestant congregations to exert major pressure on electoral processes in support of politicians willing to disavow the alcohol industry and support local, state, and, eventually, national prohibition laws. Their millions of pamphlets attacked not only the moral and social evils, but also the political corruption, they traced to the saloon (Lender and Martin 1987: 127–8). The United Kingdom Alliance, which became Britain’s largest temperance society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, likewise opposed the alcohol trade or as Samuel Pope, a prohibitionist lawyer, termed it, the “legalized system of temptation,” lobbying Parliament and supporting temperance politicians to undo the liberalization of the drinks trade that had occurred earlier in the century (Yeomans 2014: 69). The logic of these mutually reinforcing principles encouraged temperance activists throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a range of national settings to forge cross-class organizations to tackle the alcohol problem, to support movements leading to political rights for women, to attempt to move temperance concerns to matters of first principle within religious denominations and individual congregations, and to link their cause with broader democratic political movements and conversations about national interest and well-being. Temperance attracted many utopian and social reformers of the nineteenth century, particularly those with a Christian orientation, including Owenites, Shakers, and Millerites. Some founded temperance communities such as the towns of Harriman, Tennessee, Prohibition Park on Staten Island, and Harvey, Illinois, where prospective homeowners had to sign deeds promising to neither sell, store, nor consume alcohol on their property, in return for being able to live in virtuous, prosperous, and orderly communities untainted by the problems associated with liquor (Andersen 2013: 152–70). Temperance activists predominated among the early leadership of other Atlantic World reform movements such as the abolitionist and early women’s movement. This is most clearly evident in the reforming careers of activists such as Frances Power Cobbe (1822– 1904), William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79), Frederick Douglas (1818–95), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), Lucy Stone (1818–93), Amelia Bloomer (1818–94), Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), and, perhaps in its most fully developed form, the “do everything” mantra of WCTU leader Frances Willard (1839–98). But it can also be tracked in the development of a full range of temperance organizations and in the smaller stories of effective advocates like the Irish Quaker James Haughton (1795–1873) and in the long-lasting rhetoric connecting, amongst other things, freedom from alcohol to liberty in general. John Russell, an American activist writing in prohibitionist journal The National Freeman, for instance, made the case for prohibition as a form of emancipation in 1881: “bad as African slavery was in its time, it did not curse humanity so deeply as does the infinitely more degrading vice of bondage to

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the demon of strong drink” (Andersen 2013: 24). Such activists championed temperance in conjunction with a range of other reforming activities and found in temperance an ideal companion ideology for other efforts to organize progressive social change. By fusing calls for individual rationality, personal moral improvement, and progressive social reform through voluntary association as well as legal and political mechanisms, temperance reinforced both populist democratic reform efforts and elite paternalism. While it achieved numerous political successes (state-level prohibition across much of the United States by the early twentieth century, the success in parts of Britain of “local option,” and of course the wartime and post-war high water marks of widespread prohibition in the United States, Canada, and Scandinavia), temperance ideology failed on its own terms over the course of this century, despite repeated efforts by myriad organizations, either to attain a dominant position within existing religious structures, or to achieve political and social leverage sufficient to achieve comprehensive and lasting social transformation. Temperance organizations as they developed were often marked by racial, regional, and sectarian divisions. Temperance’s unifying power as an ideology was overestimated, and confidence in temperance as a primary path to a progressive future remained limited. In its evolving relationships to faith communities and theologies, other emergent ideologies, and to the growing determination to organize, regulate, and rationally improve society, temperance increasingly became a subordinate ideology, even though the systematic critique of alcohol as a culminating and summative source of social and cultural dysfunction continued to have strong and sustained appeal. The relationship between temperance and organized religion across the west provides the clearest and most consequential example of the powerful, but ultimately limited appeal of temperance ideology. Because the ideology of temperance depended on effective alliance between church(es) and states, this failure was central to the cause’s limited success, on its own terms. Among Protestant denominations, in particular, temperance made great progress and received substantial support from Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist church organizations, leading over time to the formation of powerful advocacy groups such as the Methodist Board of Temperance and Prohibition. But ambivalences among members and ministers, and personal and regional divisions over sacramental exceptions, over the proper boundaries of political activity, and over the centrality of teetotal pledges to Christian discipleship eroded complete commitment to the cause across most denominations to varying degrees. The tendency for support for temperance to concentrate in traditions with weaker overarching organizational structures was marked, and reinforced the need for officially non-denominational groups such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League in the United States, and the United Kingdom Alliance in Britain.

Temperance in an Ideological Age Socialism If there was an enduring, yet complex, mutual relationship between Protestantism and temperance, there was an equally widespread, yet complicated, link between temperance and socialism, broadly defined, in the age of industry, empire, and war. Temperance as an

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ideology has often been associated with the ascent of middle-class values, and its close focus on the adverse impact of drinking on both poverty and morality meant that temperance ideas did often depend on a patronizing or paternalistic attitude toward the poor. However, many workers’ movements took up the temperance cause just as enthusiastically as did Protestant churches. In the UK, the first wave of temperance activism in the 1830s was concentrated in northern industrial cities and driven by an ethos of working-class self-improvement. Joseph Livesey, a cheese-maker, founded the Preston Temperance Society, which was a working-class association and the first to advocate for teetotalism. Working-class teetotalers viewed alcohol as a means of oppression: sobriety was essential for the development of political consciousness and the temperance societies they established often had strong links to the early labor movement (Phillips 2014: 198; Yeomans 2014: 48–50; Pilcher 2015: 169). The Washingtonians and Catholic Total Abstinence Union in the United States and the St Patrick’s Total Abstinence Society in Sydney, Australia, also appealed predominantly to working-class members with their ethos of self-help and systems of mutual aid, practical and financial forms of assistance such as sick pay (Walsh 1991: 71–2; Allen 2011: 382; Pilcher 2015: 169). There was a strong rationale for socialist support of temperance. Some leading socialist advocates of temperance, such as Philip Snowden in Britain and Adolfo Zerboglio in France, argued that alcohol was an “opiate of the masses,” contributing to workers’ exploitation in a variety of ways. The profit motive of the alcohol trade encouraged excessive consumption, exacerbating the material and physical impoverishment of its consumers, while drinking itself made workers less likely to engage in organized labor movements and political activism. However, this was a far from universally accepted position amongst socialists, not least because drinking usually played a key role in working-class (and especially male) sociability. Other trade unionists campaigned for greater workers’ control over the brewing and distilling industries or even their full nationalization (Walsh 1991: 71–2; Pilcher 2015: 170). As Stephen Jones (1987) has highlighted, the British Labour Party in the early twentieth century exemplified the divided position of socialists on the drink question. The Labour Campaign for the Public Ownership and Control of the Liquor Trade, launched in 1919, represented one common position, which argued for the nationalization of the drink trade to remove the profit principle that incentivized excessive consumption. This campaign pointed to the successes of the Carlisle Experiment, implemented during the First World War, where the state took ownership of local breweries and licensed premises, restricted opening hours, and pioneered a pub improvement project to make pubs more family-friendly and respectable, and less focused on drinking. A second position was adopted by libertarian socialists, often with strong links to Working Men’s Clubs, who insisted that liberty for working people meant the right to make their own decisions, uninhibited by state interference in personal habits. Moreover, accepting that drinking beer, alongside other entertainments, was a just reward for hard work, they resented overly strict licensing laws and inflated prices. Finally, a third strand of the Labour Party was represented by the Trade Union and Labour Officials’ Temperance Fellowship between 1905 and the 1920s and the Workers’ Temperance League in the 1930s. They argued that abstinence—even prohibition—was necessary for the liberation of workers from poverty and exploitation, and for the development of political consciousness. Alfred Salter, MP for West Bermondsey, exemplified this position in 1926, writing (about his constituents) that

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The beer is purchased at the expense of their milk, their boots, their well-being. A poor home might have been made brighter, little bodies might have been a trifle better ­nourished if the money had not gone in drink. Yes, and the minds of the parents might have been keener, clearer, sturdier for the fight to abolish poverty and social injustice, if that money had been spent on something less deadening and narcotic than alcohol. (Jones 1987: 117–18)

French socialists were similarly divided on the alcohol question. Although the early temperance movement in France was dominated by the political and intellectual elite and did not reach a wide audience, at the turn of the twentieth century there was a concerted effort to reach out to the working classes through labor movement associations, as well as various Catholic and Protestant organizations, and to ally the temperance message with campaigns for better working conditions, housing, and education. Most trade unions and a branch of the Socialist Party interpreted alcohol abuse as a product of “industrial capitalism … a useful tool created by the industrial bourgeoisie to keep workers docile, ignorant and poverty-stricken,” but tended to view temperance activism as a distraction from their main cause of overthrowing the capitalist system. Arguing that alcoholism “would disappear with the worker revolution,” they were reluctant to engage with temperance organizations, concentrating instead on building up the militancy of the labor movement. Others within French socialism criticized this stance as an excuse for inaction and insisted that workers “brutalized by drink” would be incapable of effecting a revolution or meaningful social change. This interpretation was taken up by the Association des travailleurs antialcooliques, established in 1909 and later known as the Fédération des ouvriers antialcooliques. This organization stressed that drinkers were “unreliable in times of strikes, were unfaithful union members, and would always settle for lower wages and poor working conditions,” undermining the entire enterprise of socialist change (Prestwich 1980: 39–47). In early twentieth-century Russia, socialist leaders, unions, and the press likewise sought to promote a temperance-influenced ideal of “conscious” workers, committed to sobriety, rationality, self-control, education, and activism as a means of improving workers’ conditions and rights. After the 1917 Revolution, sobriety was incorporated into Soviet state ideology as part of the construction of the socialist new man, dedicated to progress and productivity, while propagandistic images of drinking and drunkenness were associated with counter-revolutionary forces or enemies of the state. This ideological position drove the implementation of stringent anti-alcohol laws between 1917 and 1921, which were then gradually ameliorated in part due to widespread resistance from workers themselves (Phillips 1997: 26–7, 32–3; Phillips 2014: 257–9). In the pre-revolutionary years, organized workers had on key occasions used “sobriety as a weapon against the tsarist state,” boycotting alcohol to deprive the state of the revenue derived from its monopoly control of the alcohol trade. However, in the context of Soviet anti-alcohol laws and propaganda that so viciously attacked drinking, which was an integral part of working-class sociability, many laborers reacted by defending their right to drink using the language of the revolution itself to insist that the workers’ revolution should be celebrating, not denigrating, working-class culture (Phillips 1997: 30–41). Socialists in Mexico also opposed alcohol for its association with the poverty and general “backwardness” of its lower-class population, as well as for its use as a form of pay in oppressive

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Figure 7.5  Beat the enemy of the cultural revolution poster, 1930. From the Russian State Library, Moscow. Image by Heritage Images via Getty Images.

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systems of debt peonage. The populist socialist governor of Yucatan, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, devoted part of his inaugural address in 1922 to this anti-alcohol message: It is a great mistake to go to the cantinas and spend money that you worked hard to earn, [leaving it] in the hands of the octopuses and spongers who never want the people to progress and better themselves. I ask all of you to promise me with all of your hearts that you will never go to the cantinas to get drunk, because if you keep doing it, the working people will be held back forever. (Fallaw 2002: 48)

Although socialist ideas about temperance led to some state-level prohibition laws in Mexico, and also garnered substantial grassroots support, the anti-alcohol position was undermined by a widespread black market which had the involvement of prominent politicians and the importance of alcohol to popular forms of sociability and political participation (Fallaw 2002; Phillips 2014: 271–3).

Nationalism In most places where temperance flourished, campaigns against alcohol took on heightened importance when connected to debates about the state of the nation and “fears about national decline” (Pilcher 2015: 174). In France, the temperance movement only really took hold after the 1870 defeat in the Franco-Prussian War: the defeat was partly attributed to the increasing consumption of industrial spirits having weakened the population in moral, physical, and psychological terms. Degeneration theory and eugenicist thinking added further urgency to the alcohol question’s implications for national strength in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These theories suggested that people with inherited disabilities and deviant tendencies—including alcoholism, variously defined—should be prevented from reproducing in order to protect the national stock. The First World War increased the impact of this kind of thinking, particularly in Europe, as did the emergence of fascism. During the First World War, the French imposed rigorous restrictions on alcohol for both civil and military populations, under the influence of vocal warnings of temperance groups about the perils of spirits consumption for fertility, health, and strength that would undermine the war effort and post-war recovery (Phillips 2014: 202–7, 240–1, 251–2). Similarly in Britain, defeat in the Boer War in the late nineteenth century spurred much debate about “national efficiency and racial degeneration,” leading to new approaches to dealing with the alcohol problem. These included the Inebriates Act of 1898, which provided for the containment of habitual drunkards in reform asylums, and increased rates of taxation on drink. In 1914, the wife of then Chancellor, David Lloyd George, described alcohol as one of the “great evils which were paralysing our national resources,” while the Chancellor himself famously declared a year later, in the midst of the First World War, that “we are fighting three foes, Germany, Austria and Drink: and as far as I can see the greatest of these deadly foes is Drink” (Yeomans 2014: 99–101). Emerging research into fascist Italy and Nazi Germany demonstrates heightened state concerns about the relationship between alcohol, national strength, productivity, and social order in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, the Nazis promoted wine-drinking through rural festivals emphasizing the Roman roots of German culture in an attempt to erode consciousness of class difference, and the Italian fascist regime planted informants in bars to monitor potentially subversive behavior (Fabian 2018; Ferris 2018).

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In the United States, too, Nativist forms of nationalism meant that anti-alcohol ideas and policies gained greater support in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, since rapidly rising immigrant populations—mostly from Catholic, southern and eastern European backgrounds—were associated with drinking and its associated social problems. As national prohibition legislation went before Congress in 1917, the heightened patriotism engendered by America’s entrance into the First World War added further emotional weight to attacks on German-American-owned breweries and appeals to national efficiency through abstinence (Clark 1976: 124–9; Lender and Martin 1987: 125–30; McGirr 2016: 27–35). While the patriotic climate intensified by the First World War has long been recognized by historians as helping to ensure the rapid passage of national prohibition law in the United States, as has the longer history of anti-immigrant sentiment shaping the temperance movement, the heightened association between white Protestant nationalism and prohibitionism during the Prohibition era itself (1920–33) has often been overlooked. As Lisa McGirr explains, the revival and expansion of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, attracting up to 5 million members by 1925, owed much to the implementation of the prohibition law, and the depiction of violators of the law as enemies of the nation. Klan activists believed that African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in general comprised a morally corrupt fifth column, undermining the social order embodied by the anti-liquor legislation and the white Protestant nationalism they violently upheld. Klansmen often worked with local police to conduct vigilante raids searching for illegal liquor, targeting homes in Italian, Mexican, African American, and other ethnic minority neighborhoods, as well as regularly publishing anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic propaganda, demonizing their targets as orchestrators of the organized crime and moral corruption centered on the illegal alcohol trade (McGirr 2016: 132–42). Connections between more liberationist visions of nationalism and anti-alcohol ideas have received somewhat greater scholarly attention. Under the influence of temperance ideology, temperance and nationalism became closely intertwined at times in places as diverse as Ireland, India, and Poland. In Ireland, Father Mathew’s movement, despite strenuously emphasizing the non-political nature of his temperance organization, became associated with Irish nationalism, particularly Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to repeal the Act of Union which joined Britain and Ireland. Supporters of Father Mathew regarded “sobriety and political consciousness as directly connected,” and blamed drinking for Irish political apathy, military weakness, and vulnerability to English claims that they were unable to govern themselves (Allen 2011: 381. See also Moloney 1998: 9–10). Later in the nineteenth century, Irish and Irish-American nationalists likewise viewed temperance as key to the success of the Home Rule campaign to achieve Irish self-governance and the Land League movement to tackle exploitative landlords. As one representative of the Land League stated at an 1885 convention of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union in Brooklyn: The cause of Ireland had no hope of success unless Irishmen were temperate … It was only necessary to spread temperance among the Irish and God Almighty might do the rest. God had made the Irish naturally temperate, and if he kept from rum he would be successful. (Moloney 1998: 10. See also Walsh 1991: 69–72)

In India, temperance also became linked to the nationalist cause in the early twentieth century as a means of fostering political consciousness, but also in terms of throwing off Western influence, which was blamed for changing alcohol consumption patterns.

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Nationalists called for a return to traditional customs in which India’s various religious traditions, from Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism to Sikhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism, censured alcohol use to varying degrees. In the 1920s, Mahatma Gandhi led a campaign picketing and boycotting liquor stores that drew on these principles as well as aiming to reduce the income stream obtained from them by the British government (Tyrrell 2003: 308–10). In nineteenth-century Poland, strong connections were forged between temperance, Catholicism, and ethnic nationalism, due to alcohol’s association with anti-Jewish sentiment and Russian political dominance. As innkeeping was one of the few occupations open to Jews, and serfs were more or less forced to spend their incomes in inns, anti-feudal protests often targeted Jewish-run inns for destruction. Moreover, temperance societies established by the Catholic Church were most widespread and popular in regions subject to Russian partition, indicating that the strong association forged in temperance rhetoric between freedom from alcohol and freedom from foreign rule afforded space for more practical organization for independence (Moskalewicz and Zieliński 1995: 225).

Colonialism Temperance spread globally during this era alongside expanding European and American influence in colonial territories, often in connection with missionary activity. The world operations of the WCTU, the International Order of the Good Templars, and the World League Against Alcoholism were particularly active in spreading temperance ideas to settler colonial societies, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, as well as colonies in India, West Africa, and East Asia (Nugent 2011: 344–5). There was an ongoing tension between European countries seeking to profit from the trade in alcohol to their colonies, and the application of temperance ideology to colonial subjects, who were usually deemed even more susceptible to alcohol-induced degeneration and moral corruption than the poor at home because of their racial difference. Colonial ideology generally held that trade, Christianity, and sobriety were all necessary to impart “civilization” to colonized peoples, so the trade in alcohol—especially distilled spirits—and the tax revenue this afforded many colonial governments were caught between different impulses (Phillips 2014: 216–22; Pilcher 2015: 171). But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with the establishment of temperance-led organizations like the United Committee for the Prevention of the Demoralization of the Native Races by the Liquor Traffic in England, racialized concerns about the vulnerability of non-white peoples to alcohol had led to stricter regulations in most colonial territories, as outlined by Dan Malleck in this volume. The temperance campaign led from 1908 by French Governor Gabriel Angoulvant in Côte d’Ivoire provides a clear illustration of the synergy between colonial and temperance ideologies. The French vision of colonialism in Africa had as a key component the development of economic rationality amongst Africans, whom the French viewed as living in a state of nature. Imposing direct taxation—a head tax—was justified in terms of giving Africans a reason to engage in wage-earning labor. This was deeply connected to Angoulvant’s temperance efforts in the colony because this approach to taxation meant the colonial government would be less reliant on taxes from the liquor trade. Temperance campaigns concentrated on stopping the practice of paying African laborers with distilled spirits, producing less palm wine to protect profits in the palm oil trade, and increasing imports of French wine. Africans

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were exhorted to consume French wine, which temperance activists understood to be healthy and a means of transmitting French culture to Africans, and to avoid other alcohol so as to increase their efficiency as laborers and taxpayers, resist their supposedly impulsive nature, and reduce moral degeneration and criminality. Anti-alcohol manuals instructed Ivorians “instead to spend their money more wisely, on clothes or on furnishing their huts” (White 2007: 668–70, 674–5). While much temperance activity in colonial contexts rested on paternalistic, patronizing, and racist attitudes toward colonized peoples, some temperance organizations acknowledged their complicity with colonialist ideology and violence and sought to address this. In their 1933, 1935, and 1939 conventions, the World WCTU branch in Australia adopted resolutions in support of Aboriginal equality, rights, land ownership, and welfare (Grimshaw 1998: 211). A relatively underexplored aspect of temperance is its adoption and appeal at times among the colonized and otherwise disenfranchised peoples. Africans in settings as diverse as Ghana, Cape Colony, and Liberia fashioned their own temperance movements with complex relationships to dominant temperance ideology, but with important consequences for local social and political development. King Ghartey IV, for instance, established a temperance society in the Gold Coast in 1862, after returning from travel to Britain, while Nigerian leaders petitioned colonial authorities to stop the trade in alcohol (Phillips 2014: 218; Pilcher 2015: 172). In the United States, temperance ideas and practices achieved considerable traction in a wide range of African American associations. Similarly to the Irish immigrant communities seeking to dispel negative ethnic stereotypes in Australia and the United States, African Americans engaged with temperance to counter racial stereotypes of Black people being driven by passions and lacking self-restraint, as well as to enhance their options for social uplift. In doing so, they drew on temperance rhetoric that had likened drinking to a form of enslavement. William Wells Brown, for instance, an abolitionist, writer, and temperance activist, advanced a broad concept of temperance as the “restraint of passions” of all sorts, indicting slavery, economic exploitation, and drunkenness alike as forms of incivility driven by the passions of greed and desire (Stewart 2011: 5–11). Temperance principles were adapted and adopted among many Native American nations to serve cultural revivalist and sovereignty agendas, most notably in the Six Nations Temperance League that descended from Handsome Lake’s (1735–1815) movement among the Seneca but continuing in many forms, including, for example, the Cherokee Temperance Society and the temperance provisions of the Ghost Dance Movement of the 1890s (Abbott 1999: 40–2; Ishii 2003: 671–2, 687–8).

Conclusion Temperance was at the center of the relationship between alcohol, religion, and ideology, exhibiting great power to direct and shape social change in the century from 1850 to 1950. Contrary to some popular misconceptions, rooted in a caricatured representation of the United States’ experience with national prohibition, temperance was not just the preserve of middle-class Protestant evangelicals, nor was it fundamentally a top-down movement aimed at tightening social control. Evangelical Protestantism had a close and enduring relationship with the emergence and development of temperance activism to be sure, but non-Protestant religions as well as secular workers’ organizations also took up the temperance cause

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in a variety of contexts, and many social groups used temperance in conjunction with other efforts to control and shape change. Moreover, as temperance developed into a mature ideology itself it intersected with other ideologies of dominance and resistance in multiple ways, and with broader movements of social reform. The logic of that ideology and its principles led a diverse array of activists across the West and beyond to dedicate themselves to profound social and personal transformations. If the end results were not societies freed from the destructive negative consequences and corruptions of alcohol, and the effective end of alcohol’s important role in the development of trade, capitalism, and the global marketplace, the social, political, and cultural legacies of this period of intense activism were astonishingly consequential. Temperance, progress, and political activism became closely intertwined throughout the northern Atlantic world and the world they influenced.

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8

CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS DEBORAH TONER

Introduction Cultural representations of alcohol between 1850 and 1950 fall into three major strands. First, temperance and prohibition were depicted as solutions to various social problems that alcohol was perceived to cause. Second, alcoholism was increasingly examined as a medical condition in its own right, and as symbolic of individual and social pathologies. And, third, drunken consciousness was seriously explored in terms of its relationship to artistic perception and individual subjectivities in both positive and negative ways.1 The period was marked by considerable variation in the relative dominance of these types of representation and their relationship to the social position of alcohol. The moral certainties of early temperance narratives in the mid-nineteenth century gave way to much greater ambivalence in the depiction of alcohol by the early twentieth century, when prohibitionism was in its heyday. The development of medical and psychological ideas about alcohol addiction also helped to produce artistic explorations of various alcoholic pathologies. However, cultural representations of alcohol did not simply replace moral with medical frameworks for understanding alcohol’s effects on individuals and society, but became more complex, multi-layered, and ambivalent in their treatment of alcohol.

Temperance and Prohibition Temperance Narratives Although emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century, temperance narratives remained widespread in visual culture, literature, and the performing arts throughout the century, especially in England and the United States, where temperance plays were often sell-outs and temperance stories were printed in high circulation daily newspapers. A classic feature of these moralistic works is the descent of a, usually male, central character down the slippery slope of drinking, whose alcohol consumption often begins in an innocuous and innocent manner but quickly spirals toward moral, physical, economic, and social ruin for him and his family (Lander 2003: 64; Cordell 2008: 4).2 Numerous scholars have highlighted the typically gendered, melodramatic, and formulaic nature of these narratives, in which the destructive male drinker can be redeemed through the moral purity and intervention of a long-suffering female character—a wife or daughter—whose terrible suffering at the hands of the drinker is structurally necessary for his return to sobriety (Warner 1997b: 180–8; Frick 2003: 200; Lander 2003: 71; Cordell 2008: 5–7). In other cases, the pains inflicted on the wives and daughters go unrewarded, with the drinker following a “linear path to destruction” after his

first taste of alcohol (Frick 2003: 200–1). Punishing the drinker rather than allowing for his narrative redemption was more common in British temperance plays than early American ones, although as American temperance literature became more sensationalist, graphically violent, and lurid by the 1840s and 1850s, the emphasis on the drinker’s potential to reform was less pronounced (Reynolds 1997: 23–7; Frick 2003: 200–1). Timothy Shay Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854) exemplifies many of these features. It was “the most popular temperance novel ever published in America,” selling over 400,000 copies, and was later adapted successfully for both the stage and the silver screen. Featuring three murders, scenes of graphic violence, and frightening hallucinations, Arthur’s work dwells in dark detail on the destruction wrought by alcohol consumption and numerous characters are helpless to resist its power. The most memorable story-line focuses on the sober redemption of Joe Morgan, who promises his young daughter Mary that he will never drink again after she is fatally wounded by a glass thrown at Joe in his regular tavern. Joe is therefore saved through the selfless suffering of his daughter, but through the terrible fates of other drinking characters, the novel presents an overall picture of individuals and society being overwhelmed by the influence of alcohol. Consequently, it makes an explicit argument in favor of prohibitionist legislation as the only solution to the problem of alcohol, arguing that “The young, the weak, and the innocent can no more resist its assaults, than the lamb can resist the wolf. They are helpless if you abandon them to the powers of evil” (Qtd in Reynolds 1997: 31. See also Frick 2003: 202). While classic temperance plays and stories became less popular in the later nineteenth century, an early generation of American films dealing with alcohol and drinking in the 1920s replicated many of their characteristic narrative devices. In films such as The Enemy Sex (1924) and Daring Love (1924), the drinking problems of central male characters are intertwined with melodramatic love stories that reinforce traditional gender roles. As in many temperance tales, the corrupting stimulus for male drinking is often external to his own essentially good character, although these forces tend to be linked to the changing social environment of the 1920s. For instance, in The Curse of Drink (1922), Bill Sanford is driven to drink by bootleggers who harass him, while male protagonists in The Foolish Matrons (1921) and Tin Gods (1926) are driven to drink by “selfish” or “overly ambitious” career women. The redemption of male drinkers is also commonly effected by a devoted, self-sacrificing wife, in the classic temperance tradition, or a sympathetic woman drawn as more fun-loving, less complicated, and of lower social status than the stereotypical Victorian housewife. Female characters who refuse to help the male drinker, meanwhile, are “often made to suffer” in narrative terms, and those male drinkers who fail to resolve their alcohol problems are usually minor characters whose inability to return to sobriety is cast as evidence of their moral inferiority to the male hero who can overcome alcohol’s curse (Herd 1986: 220–6).

Temperance and Race Alongside the anti-slavery movement and women’s rights movement, temperance was a major pillar of antebellum reform in the United States and its language and ideas were intimately bound up with those other reform movements. It was not uncommon for alcohol consumption to be represented as a form or condition of enslavement, and the heavy

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emphasis on women’s moral purity and vulnerability to drunken men within temperance literature raised pressing issues for the women’s movement. DoVeanna Fulton has noted that “mainstream temperance literature and propaganda either ignored African Americans or caricatured them in stereotypical fashion,” depicting African Americans in northern saloons as engaging in a culture of excess (2007: 209). Such stock racist characters were mobilized in anti-abolition fiction, in which escaped slaves and free African Americans regularly became inveterate drunkards, with the same violence, destitution, and depravity that drunkards typically wrought in temperance literature. Furthering the anti-abolition argument, such fiction suggested that the institution of slavery protected African Americans from a descent into drunken ruin. D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation similarly associated alcohol use with racist stereotypes of African American criminality and loss of control, and conveyed implicit support for prohibition (Drowne 2005: 20; Cordell 2008: 10). African American temperance writers generally used white or racially ambiguous characters to avoid reinforcing such stereotypes, and employed images of alcohol use to challenge other racialized assumptions (Rosenthal 1997: 156; Fulton 2007: 210–11). Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), for instance, contrasts a temperate, respectable African American community in Philadelphia, with intemperate white characters to counteract stereotypes about African American passivity and irrational violence. In doing so, it interrogates the anti-miscegenation impetus of recent race riots and shows the value of building African American communities around the values of temperance, restraint, and hard work. Two characters in particular—George Stevens, the wealthy white neighbor of the Garie family, and McCloskey, his Irish working-class lackey—victimize the Garies and other African American characters. Stevens’s and McCloskey’s actions are fundamentally motivated by their intemperate nature: this is manifested first as economic greed and later as excessive consumption of alcohol, which in turn helps to fuel increasingly extreme acts of violence and malice against the African American community (Levine 1994: 356–66). William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) adopts a similar narrative strategy to critique slavery itself, inverting the anti-abolition argument that slavery protected African Americans from the evils of drunkenness, by depicting slavery as a “patriarchal institution that stimulates, rather than restrains, the intemperate desires of white male masters,” whose intoxication through “drink, power, and sexual gratification” drives much of the novel’s plot (Levine 1997: 95–9). America’s most famous anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, can also be read as a temperance novel. Alcohol is demonized throughout, even though some characters who drink, such as Cassy and Prue, are treated sympathetically because their recourse to alcohol is driven by the desperate circumstances in which they live due to slavery. Ryan Cordell has argued that the novel adopts the conventional fall and redemption narrative structure of many temperance tales, fusing alcohol and slavery as corrupting forces that must be overcome. Tom is cast as the staple temperance figure of the long-suffering dependent of the drunkard, in turn represented by the successive slave owners to whom Tom is bound. Tom’s circumstances become progressively worse as he is sold from one slave owner to the next, each of whom drinks more and is crueler than the last. At the nadir—Tom’s death following a violent beating—the novel facilitates a redemption. The abhorrent drunkard Simon Legree, who is responsible for Tom’s death, appears to

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die from the effects of alcohol, shortly after George Shelby, the son of Tom’s original owner, arrives at Legree’s plantation to buy Tom back. Upon witnessing Tom’s death, George, who is a paragon of temperate virtue, pledges to take up the cause of abolition and frees his remaining slaves. This thorough alignment of the anti-alcohol and anti-slavery narratives is not incidental: Cordell suggests that Stowe used the “familiar radicalism” of temperance language and ideas to encourage her primarily white, middle-class audience to support the “unfamiliar” radicalism of abolition (2008: 14–21. See also Warner 1997a: 143).

Critiquing Temperance and Prohibition While broadly pro-temperance sentiments can be found in much American and British literature of the nineteenth century, proponents of sober virtue were also mocked. In the early twentieth century, America’s national prohibition law was subject to more overt criticism within fiction, theatre, and film, supported by some explicitly positive depictions of drinking. Drinking was also employed in Ireland’s literary revival and in new genres of fiction, such as the hard-boiled detective genre, to articulate alternative codes of morality to the Victorian values of temperance. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s contributions to the American Renaissance pointed to the hypocrisy of temperance reformers, through depictions of characters who were publicly and vocally in favor of temperance but who got drunk in secret. They also juxtaposed jovial drinking scenes with scenes showing the negative consequences of drinking (Reynolds 1997: 35–43). Even writers who explicitly supported temperance values gently mocked or critiqued temperance advocates. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–9), for instance, sees numerous characters deliberately voicing their avoidance of alcohol because of its threat to morality, responsibility, and prosperity. But her later fiction contained humorous references to drinking that “implied positive values of ‘conviviality’ and ‘jollity’,” and poked fun at a rigid and pompous adherence to total abstinence (Berman 2008: 170, 176). Similarly, George Eliot paid considerable attention to the dangers of drinking in works such as Mr Gilfil’s Love Story (1857), Janet’s Repentance (1857), and Silas Marner (1861). However, in both Silas Marner and Felix Holt (1866), traditional English public houses act as symbols of joviality, rural customs, and community, which the novels suggest are being eroded by the advance of industrialization and the values of sober virtue underpinning that process (Earnshaw 2000: 209–15. See also McCormack 2000: 2–4). This nostalgic trend of depicting English public houses as bastions of “simpler and more humanist values of a past era” continued into the twentieth century. George Orwell’s 1946 essay “The Moon Under Water”—in which Orwell wistfully outlines the convivial, familiar, community-orientated, Victorian-style characteristics of his ideal pub—is still influential in shaping debates about what constitutes the “perfect” pub (Rountree and Ackroyd 2015: 102–3). Misleading stereotypes about American prohibitionists being austere fanatics that continue to feature in popular cultural representations of the prohibition era took firm shape in the cultural production of 1920s America, even as temperance melodramas maintained a strong presence in cinema. Bootleggers, rumrunners, crooked cops, speakeasies, crime bosses, silent partners, and moonshiners all became stock features of popular literature, plays, and films during the 1920s. Many of these narratives took no overt position on the

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rights and wrongs of drinking, but casualized the violation of prohibition in the background of such films, stories, and plays, and therefore at least implied a critique of temperance values (Drowne 2005: 5, 31; Clark 2009: 144). Some stage productions explicitly critiqued both the imposition and implementation of prohibition in a largely comic manner, depicting the toothlessness of law enforcement against wealthy, fun-loving young drinkers, the struggles of ordinary, decent fellows in circumventing the law to obtain a drink, the priggish attitudes of prohibition supporters, and the sense of loss for male camaraderie in nostalgic remembrances of the saloons of old (Clark 2009: 129–33).3 One of the most iconic novels of America’s prohibition era, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), explicitly skewers prohibitionism and the broader social values with which it had become associated. In a pivotal scene, the American expatriates Bill and Jake travel through the Basque countryside, where they are invigorated by the openness, sociability, and vitality of the local culture, which is expressed primarily through scenes of communal drinking. The “vital social function” that drinking is shown to play in this uplifting environment is contrasted against the “rigid restrictiveness” of contemporary American culture, exemplified by prohibition, as Jake and Bill talk during a break in their fishing trip. Their playful conversation includes savagely satirical allusions to several prominent American political and social figures—such as Anti-Saloon League leader Wayne B. Wheeler—who collectively represent the puritanical worldview that produced prohibition. Their banter concludes with Bill declaring “the saloon must go, and I will take it with me,” which, together with the nearly constant drinking and conversations about drinking throughout the novel, symbolically aligns these characters with a defiant rejection of, and escape from, the repressive, insular, and hostile values they attribute to prohibition-era America (Schwarz 2001: 180–90. See also Crowley 1994: 45–6; Nicholls 2000b: 88–90). The representation of alternative moralities of drinking was also a characteristic feature of Ireland’s literary revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Works within this period were not celebratory about drinking, since many writers were concerned with rejecting racialized stereotypes of Irish drunkenness. However, they do tend to adopt a less black and white moral framework regarding alcohol consumption than typical temperance narratives, and this contributes to their overall critique of the Catholic church and the English state as oppressive forces in Irish society. Playwrights such as John Synge and Sean O’Casey created characters whose social wisdom, resilience, and vitality derived from their immersion in drinking culture and the pub environment. Such characters were contrasted against pious, self-flagellating, sober characters whose temperate values and behavior left them no better off than their drinking counterparts (Dwyer 1986: 276–81; Lilienfield 1999: 93). Various critiques have also commented on the ambivalent, contradictory nature of James Joyce’s treatment of drinking: by turns he showcases the vibrancy and distinctiveness of Irish pub culture and castigates it for perpetuating social, economic, and political problems in Irish society. As Joe Brooker has noted, Ulysses (1922) is “testament to this double attitude, a book so deeply immersed in booze whose central character is nonetheless ‘disgustingly sober’.” Leonard Bloom’s near teetotalism and lack of affinity for Dublin’s pub culture are contrasted, sometimes comically, sometimes dramatically, against “the youthful extravagance of Stephen Dedalus,” which acts as “a revolt against the bourgeois norms which Leopold Bloom partially embodies.” However, Bloom’s sobriety and detachment from

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Dedalus’s world of alcohol-fueled irreverence are also, at least in part, what enable him to critically assess Irish nationalism and the Catholic church (Brooker 2000: 120. See also Dwyer 1986: 282; Lilienfield 1999: 93). The illegality of drinking during America’s prohibition era made alcohol a symbolic vehicle for conveying the moral ambiguity of a newly forming character and genre: hardboiled detective fiction. Dashiel Hammett’s convention setting novels, such as The Maltese Falcon (1930) (see Figure 8.1) and The Thin Man (1934), all feature heavy drinking central protagonists who, while broadly working for good and just ends, are generally willing to use nefarious methods to achieve those ends. The alcohol consumption of such iconic characters as Sam Spade and Nick Charles is repeatedly associated with the darker side of their work. The willingness of the detectives to drink signals their familiarity with the illegal underworld of bootleggers and speakeasies and their uneasy relationship with law-abiding society. At the same time, it gives them an insider access to criminals and criminal activity that enables them to achieve results that more respectable law enforcement officers could not. Although the legal status of alcohol in the post-prohibition period removed this symbolic potential, heavy drinking remained central to the morally ambiguous identity of detectives in this genre. The symbolic function of alcohol in later works shifted to mark some pathology within the detective’s character, and helped to popularize the developing view of alcoholism as an ambiguous combination of an individual’s moral, physiological, and psychological pathologies by the mid-twentieth century (Filloy 1986: 254–8, 262–8).4

Figure 8.1  Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Warner Bros, 1941. Image by Archive Photos/Stringer via Getty Images.

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Alcoholism, Deviance, and Pathologies of Drinking While alcoholism as a concept only began to solidify in popular consciousness by the middle decades of the twentieth century, artists and writers around the world had been exploring alcohol addiction in diverse ways since at least the mid- to late nineteenth century. Temperance narratives placed a heavy emphasis on the moral, social, and economic problems caused to individuals, families, and society by habitual drinking, but they increasingly introduced depictions of physiological and psychological symptoms of prolonged, excessive alcohol use, which also featured regularly in other fictional portraits of drinking. Realist novels, like Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836), depicted habitual drunkenness leading to disease, hallucinations, and death, albeit without the terminology of alcoholism (Earnshaw 2000: 196). As the concept of addiction took greater hold, alcoholic characters frequently exhibited a standard repertoire of symptoms and behaviors, including delirium tremens, withdrawal, trembling hands, blackouts, progressive compulsive drinking, secretive drinking, self-loathing, depression, liver disease, jaundice, nervous disorders, insanity, and physical dishevelment. This is evident, to different degrees and to name just a few examples, in texts as diverse as Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877) in France, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) in Britain, Ángel de Campo’s La Rumba (1890–1) and Federico Gamboa’s Santa (1901) in Mexico, and William Faulkner’s Pylon (1935) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) in the United States (Huertas García-Alejo 1985: 223–9; Gilmore 1987: 38–9; Dardis 1990: 63, 123–4; Earnshaw 2000: 218–20; Nicholls 2000a: 17; Baker 2001: 124–8; Toner 2015a: 229–43). Beyond simply expanding representations of heavy drinkers to include physiological and psychological symptoms of alcohol abuse that were simultaneously being codified and studied in the medical sphere, writers and artists used alcoholic characterization to explore broader themes and issues, including degeneration, deviance, and modernity, as well as the condition of addiction itself and the process of recovery.

Alcoholism and Degeneration The association between alcoholism and societal degeneration was prominent in French, Spanish, and Latin American literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in works concerned with the conditions of urban, working-class life. Degeneration theory, most notably expounded in the influential work of French psychiatrists Valentin Magnan and Benedict Morel, posited that the “physical and moral unhealthiness of one generation led to physical, intellectual, and social decay in subsequent generations,” and was used “to explain the widespread poverty, crime, prostitution, disease, and general malaise that appeared as the dark side of industrial modernity.” Alcoholism was thought to be both a major cause and consequence of this process of degeneration, with implications for public health, national productivity, and social order (Toner 2015a: 214. See also Bynum 1984: 59–70; Sournia 1990: 98–108). Zola’s L’Assommoir, the seventh novel in his Rougon-Macquart cycle, is probably the most well-known literary representation of alcoholism and degeneration. The devastating collapse of Gervaise and Coupeau into alcoholism and death is explicitly triggered by the precariousness and hardships of working-class life, starting in earnest when Coupeau is

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left unable to work as a roofer following a serious fall. The novel depicts the working-class neighborhood in which they live as a squalid, demoralizing, and oppressive environment that conditions their drinking behavior. There are, however, an underlying fatalism and determinism that drive their relatively sudden recourse to heavy drinking in the face of mounting personal problems. Steven Earnshaw has highlighted that “both characters consciously choose to drink at the expense of all else,” with a will to drink that is essentially existential in nature (2015: 205–6). That their response to both existential crises and the hardships of their social environment is to drink compulsively, however, is also attributable to hereditary factors. Gervaise is first described in La fortune des Rougon (1871), the first novel in the cycle, as having been “conceived in drunkenness,” her parents both being violent drunkards, and she had also inherited a physical deformity, which was commonly attributed to the process of degeneration. Meanwhile, the accident that triggers Coupeau’s habitual drinking recalls the death of his father, who had died from head injuries after falling from a roofing job while drunk. Although it is the memory of this that had previously stopped Coupeau from drinking strong liquor, suffering the same accident as his father seems to awaken the same will to drink that it is implicitly suggested his father had once had (Huertas García-Alejo 1985: 222). One of Spain’s foremost literary figures of the nineteenth century, Benito Pérez Galdós, incorporated the framework of degeneration theory into portraits of working-class

Figure 8.2  L’Assommoir theatrical poster, 1877. Poster for Theatre de l’Ambigu-Comique, with drawings by Alfred le Petit (1841–1909), for the theatrical performance of the novel by Emile Zola (1840–1902). Paris, Hôtel Carnavalet (Art Museum). Image by DEA/M. Seemuller, DeAgostini via Getty Images.

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drunkenness and alcoholism, at the same time as implicitly critiquing some assumptions that underpinned degenerationist thinking. Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–7) and Angel Guerra (1890–1), realist novels exploring working-class life and conditions in an urbanizing, industrializing Spain, reproduce numerous associations that degeneration theory posited between alcohol abuse and criminality, social deviancy, filth, insanity, laziness, and disease. The Babel sons in Angel Guerra, for instance, are described as “parasitic and incapable of work, living a criminal and dissolute life involving forgery, theft, gambling, smoking and drinking,” and exhibit characteristics and conditions commonly attributed to degeneration, including imbecility, hysteria, and epilepsy. Similarly, Mauricia’s drinking in Fortunata y Jacinta is linked to powerful imagery of dirt, contagion, and social pathology in a pivotal scene where Mauricia, whom the reader already knows is a prostitute, an unfit mother, and suffering from hysteria, sits drunkenly atop a heap of manure in the grounds of a convent causing a scene (Peris Fuentes 2003: 106–7, 111–15). However, Pérez Galdós also undermines degeneration theory’s insistence on the hereditary transference of immoral, unhealthy, and criminal tendencies as an explanation for the prevalence of poverty, disease, and crime amongst the urban working classes. By highlighting the hypocrisy of several middle-class characters who observe the terrible conditions in which many working-class characters live, Pérez Galdós actually points to poverty itself as the root cause of the social problems explored in the novel, even as they are depicted in the language of social pathologies. In addition, the heavy, compulsive drinking of several characters is driven by their experience of complex psychological traumas inflicted by prevailing social values. Mauricia’s drinking, for instance, is the result of her anguish at being forced to give up her daughter and join the convent because she was judged to be sexually transgressive (Peris Fuentes 2003: 101–3, 107–8). Mexican literature around the turn of the twentieth century similarly employed the language of degeneration theory in its depiction of alcoholism, and reproduced many of its key tenets, at the same time as using such representations to make broader social critiques. Federico Gamboa’s Santa (1903) traces the progressive decline of the eponymous central character into alcoholism, social deviancy, and death when she is shunned by her family after falling pregnant. At a pivotal point in the novel, and at the tipping point of Santa’s demise, a striking, extended metaphor depicts alcoholism as “a relentless war machine, atavistically transforming the drinker from a man to a beastly animal” and associates alcohol abuse with the conditions of working-class life in a threatening modern urban environment. After this point in the narrative, Santa is increasingly powerless to change her fate, “falls deeper into drunken oblivion,” and dies in a state of destitution. The inevitability of her alcohol-fueled demise provides an implicit critique of the prevalent social values that had driven Santa to this precipice. At earlier stages of the narrative, Santa seeks forgiveness from, and refuge within, her family and the Catholic Church but is unceremoniously rejected by both. As a broadly conservative Catholic author, Gamboa is hardly attacking the family and the Church as social institutions, but they are criticized on this point and Santa is treated quite sympathetically throughout the novel. Instead, Gamboa seems to be suggesting that abandoning fallen women to the dangers of the modern urban environment would further exacerbate the cycle of moral and social degeneration that seemed visible therein; as pillars of social order, the family and the Church ought to “prove themselves as the guardians of the very people that the modern urban environment put most at risk” (Toner 2015a: 236–44. See also Toner 2015b: 166–71).

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Alcoholism and Modernity All these representations of alcoholism and degeneration are set in urbanizing, industrializing environments, with which the working poor struggle to cope, or through which they are actively corrupted. In this sense, alcoholism is depicted simultaneously as a by-product of modernity and as an obstacle to further social progress. Other literary works from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, especially in Britain and the United States, figuratively tied alcoholism and modernity together in a different manner, largely without the pejorative class dynamics of the degeneration framework. Several scholars have highlighted how modernist writers represent the heavy drinking of, usually male, characters as part of their “liberation from bourgeois conventionality” and figure addiction as a sign of modern excess and decadence, defined against older Victorian values of restraint (Crowley 1994: 95. See also Dardis 1990: 4, 11; Crowley 1997: 166; Nicholls 2000a: 18; Baker 2001: 19). John Crowley and Thomas Gilmore have taken the analysis further to argue that modernist writers examined alcoholism as a disease associated with the condition of being modern, or as a determined response to the troubling alienation of modern existence (Gilmore 1987: 170; Crowley 1997: 167–73). Jack London’s John Barleycorn (1913) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) draw explicit distinctions between alcoholics and other kinds of habitual, heavy drinkers, depicting alcoholism as a disease of modernity that is willfully pursued as both a confrontation of, and attempted escape from, despair at the bleak condition of modern humanity (Crowley 1994: 32–4; Crowley 1997: 167–73). Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) is one of the most remarkable novels that treats alcoholism in this way. The distorted narrative voice of the central alcoholic character Geoffrey Firmin is marked by alcohol-induced hallucinations, which are depicted in such a way as to magnify his personal struggles into an allegory for the war, death, and destruction wrought throughout the world in the mid-twentieth century. The hallucinations through which Firmin experiences the disintegration of his marriage and his persecution in Mexico are routinely associated with the demonic imagic landscape of Hell, evoking Dante’s Inferno and positioning Firmin as an Everyman who embodies a universal condition of human despair. His distorted alcoholic perception is at once conflated with, and contrasted against, other characters’ desires to alleviate human suffering in various guises—from helping a dying stranger in Mexico to fighting the forces of fascism in Europe—thereby suggesting the futility of such action. As such, the novel as a whole posits that “imagination, insanity, or hallucination offer a surer route to more important truths than does reason or sanity,” with Firmin’s alcoholic self-destruction becoming a kind of noble response to the nightmare of modern humanity (Gilmore 1987: 22–32). The representation of alcoholism as a despairing response to modernity was also gendered in interesting ways. Crowley has argued that alcoholism was usually gendered as male in American modernist literature, partly as a reaction against the perceived “feminization” of American society in the early twentieth century, partly as an expression of nostalgia for the waning homosocial sociability of the saloon, and partly as a demonstration of masculine physicality in withstanding or enduring the ill-effects of prolonged and heavy alcohol consumption (1994: 32–4. See also Nicholls 2000a: 18). However, this gendering of alcoholism as a manly response to modernity is challenged in some modernist literature,

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Figure 8.3  Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner, José Ferrer, Tyrone Power, and Eddie Albert acting in The Sun Also Rises, Twentieth Century Fox, 1957. Image by Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images.

such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), where drinking helps to express a moral hierarchy of characters. While it is in some ways problematic to read any of the characters’ drinking behaviors as alcoholism, alcohol is central to the way in which almost all characters respond to the modern condition and how their responses are morally coded. The conflict at the heart of the novel relates to Jake’s struggle with threats to his masculine identity and authority, produced by a genital injury sustained in the First World War and by his tortured relationship with the sexually licentious Brett. As Crowley has highlighted, Jake’s drinking to cope with these traumas is never short of prodigious, but he only very rarely loses control under the influence of alcohol, in contrast to both Brett and Mike, whose drinking is consistently associated with their excessive, uncontrolled natures. In Hemingway’s portrait, drinking is certainly a masculine activity, but drunkenness is associated “with the threat of gender uncertainty” and alcoholism with the loss of control and becoming “unmanned” (1994: 47–62).

Alcoholism, Denial, and Recovery While many temperance and other literary narratives depicted alcohol addiction, it was not until the late nineteenth century, and increasingly in the twentieth century, that the subjective perspectives and experiences of the alcoholic, and the psychology of alcoholism

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as some kind of medical condition, were given serious literary and cinematic attention. Nicholas Warner argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fiction evolved away from classic temperance perspectives to incorporate a more medicalized understanding of alcoholism by the 1870s. In My Wife and I (1871) and its sequel, We and Our Neighbors (1875), the character of Bolton is not only treated more sympathetically than temperance narratives typically treated their habitual drunkards, but his motivation, “inner perspective,” and quest for “self-determination” are also given primary attention (Warner 1997a: 136–7). Instead of an omniscient narrator or another character observing Bolton’s descent into habitual drunkenness, Bolton describes the process himself as a “loss of control,” a battle with alcohol that he gradually loses. In addition, the novels posit that alcoholism is an “inherent trait rather than a deliberately chosen path of sin” and that Bolton can only begin to win the battle with alcohol by recognizing the power that it holds over him (Warner 1997a: 144–6. See also Warner 1997b: 192–5). By the mid-twentieth century, the idea that alcoholism was a medical and/or psychological condition was much more widespread, and narratives focusing on the workings of an alcoholic’s mind were more common. Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944) follows Don Birnam through a prolonged drinking binge that the novel suggests he goes through in a progressive, worsening pattern. During his drinking binge, Birnam’s perception is strikingly altered, as minor problems become mountainous obstacles, he wallows in self-pity, and he imagines grandiose reasons for his failures as a writer. In sober moments, Birnam chastises himself for such thoughts and behavior, and John Crowley has argued that this is meant to point readers to an understanding of how drinking transforms the mind of an alcoholic. Furthermore, the “stark realism” of the text, in representing the effects of drinking on Birnam’s body and mind, and Birnam’s own awareness of his drunken pretentions to grandeur serve to mock the modernist writers who had romanticized “alcoholic despair” as the “inevitable response of the sensitive consciousness to the nightmarish human condition” (Crowley 1997: 174–5. See also Crowley 1994: 140–55). Steven Earnshaw has argued, however, that Crowley is too quick to take sides with Birnam’s sober self in reaching this conclusion and that the interplay between Birnam’s sober and drunken selves depicts an unresolved existential crisis of identity and purpose (2015: 213–15, 221). Denial and self-deception have been portrayed as central to the psychology of alcoholism in a variety of literary works. Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh (1939) vividly depicts the power of denial in the character of Theodore Hickman, who returns to the bar where he used to engage in extreme, periodic drinking binges claiming to be fully sober. He insists that his sobriety has lent him an “unshakeable peace and serenity” and that he wants to pass his secret on to the other drinkers in the bar. As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that he has constructed an “elaborate network of projection, denial, self-justification, and self-deception” regarding his drinking and its consequences: it is revealed that he has recently murdered his wife to “release” her from the pain of his recurrent drinking binges and infidelity. He thinks of this as a merciful act, but it is also a form of revenge because he blames his wife’s repeated forgiveness for enabling his drunken acts of betrayal (Gilmore 1987: 48–52). Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), which was held back from publication and performance until after O’Neill’s death because of its partly autobiographical nature, explores the psychology of addiction within a family. Denial is a central motif, with each of

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the characters refusing to accept that they have a problem with drinking or other drugs, and that their addictions are causing the family serious difficulties. Even following apparent breakthroughs in their relationships with one another, they revert to the same antagonistic behaviors, usually after drinking (Dardis 1990: 249–50). Jane Lilienfield has suggested that James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) has as a central structural and narrative principle familial denial of the father’s alcoholism. Key breaks in, and textual diversions from, Stephen Dedalus’s consciousness and narration occur repeatedly at points where his father’s alcoholism produces financial, social, and emotional distress for the family or where his alcoholism is about to become obvious. The deliberate evasions and elisions in the text where alcoholic behavior and its consequences would have appeared constitute a literary state of denial (Lilienfield 1999: 103–32).5 Similarly, F. Scott Fitzgerald effectively hides the effects of Dick Divers’s drinking problem until the final third of Tender Is the Night (1934) by concentrating the negative behaviors associated with heavy drinking—violence, loss of self-control, anger, slovenliness—in a separate character, Abe North, for most of the novel (Crowley 1994: 72–81. See also Gilmore 1987: 102–3). By the middle of the twentieth century, a new direction in representations of alcoholism—the recovery narrative—began to emerge, mobilizing the definition of alcoholism as a disease advocated by groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and positioning AA as the most appropriate treatment for recovery. Films of the late 1940s and 1950s associated alcoholism with psychological conflicts and personality problems, with Billy Wilder’s 1945 adaptation of The Lost Weekend making a big impact on audiences and attracting critical acclaim. Days of Wine and Roses (1962) reveals the significant influence of AA in shaping representations of alcoholism, with attendance at AA meetings being depicted as fundamental to the process of recovery. It also signals the more common representation of female as well as male alcoholics, and a recurrent association of alcoholism with dysfunctional marriages, the frustrations of domesticity, and psychological repression (Herd 1986: 231–40; Crowley 1994: 156; Laberge 2003: 236–7; Cornes 2006: 124–36, 206–19).

Drunken Consciousness Delving into the subjectivities and psychologies of explicitly alcoholic characters was only one of the ways that writers, artists, and filmmakers used alcohol to explore the boundaries of consciousness, perception, and identity. Intoxication, as an altered state of consciousness or being, was frequently associated, either literally or metaphorically, with freedom, transcendence, hedonism, inspiration, creative vision, or artistic detachment. Particular drinking behaviors, specific drinks and drinking places, and experiences of drunkenness—sometimes overlapping with representations of the condition of alcoholism, but often not—were also built into various fictional characters’ search for meaning, selfhood, and a sense of belonging.

Metaphorical Intoxication, Being, and Perception Some French and American literature of the middle-to-late nineteenth century associated metaphorical images of intoxication with artistic inspiration and an authentic state of being, contrasted against codes of sobriety and restraint as inhibitive of true self-knowledge. This

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was broadly in keeping with the earlier British Romantics’ use of Bacchic images of intoxication and wine as a means of exploring the limits of artistic perception and the divided self.6 Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “Drink!” (1869), for instance, expounded on the necessity to “get drunk unceasingly! With wine, or poetry, or virtue, as you prefer.” This emphasizes the importance of occupying an altered state of perception, as an act of will in the pursuit of truth, while downplaying the act of drinking itself (Baker 2001: 63–4). Three poems by Emily Dickinson similarly used images of intoxication, without actually advocating drinking, to articulate a more liberated and authentic state of being than overt self-discipline and self-denial. In “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed” (1861), “We—Bee and I— Live by the Quaffing” (1861, but published posthumously), and “A Drunkard Cannot Meet a Cork” (1884, but also published posthumously), Dickinson depicts images of indulgence, quaffing, and drunkenness to subtly critique contemporary American codes of virtue that emphasized “restraint, discipline, self-control.” In these poems, bees feature recurrently as symbols of intoxicating nature, defying restrictive social conventions of sobriety, embodying exuberance, pleasure, and freedom, and subverting the more typical poetic use of bees as symbols of industry and social convention (Mitchell 2006: 102–6). Reynolds has argued that this places Dickinson within the “transcendental version of temperance,” alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Their work broadly approved of the temperance goals of self-improvement and self-reliance, but viewed the methods of mainstream temperance organizations as overly repressive and negative. Instead, they tended to emphasize the intoxicating effect—for body, mind, and spirit—of nature, and ordinary, everyday things, when perceived in the right way (Reynolds 1997: 43–55; Warner 1997b: 17–23, 33–65).

Intoxication and Artistic Perception By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, heavy alcohol (and drug) use had become much more literally entwined with artistic personae, both in terms of writers’ and artists’ personal consumption habits and in terms of their work (Logan 1974: 93–4; Dardis 1990: 3–5). This seems to have been the case across literary scenes as diverse as England, France, America, Russia, and Mexico, particularly amongst writers and artists engaged in examining or critiquing modernity in its different guises. As James Nicholls has suggested, from Baudelaire onwards, intoxication was regularly associated with “transcendence” in modernist art and literature, but in more multifaceted and complex ways than in earlier works and with a greater emphasis on the material act of alcohol consumption: “drink appeared in the work of writers and artists from Manet to Picasso and Rimbaud to Apollinaire as metynomy of, metaphor for, escape from, reaction to, engagement with, and everyday, mundane fact of modern life” (2000a: 19). French poet Arthur Rimbaud perhaps best exemplifies the idea that intoxication was a fundamental facet of artistic identity and practice. He viewed the poet as a kind of “medium” for the transmission of ideas and truths, with a responsibility to push the limits of perception through intoxication and thus become a more open, expansive, and exceptional transmitter: “The poet must make himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses” (Baker 2001: 74–5). The Russian symbolist

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poet Alexander Blok similarly depicted intoxication as a means of stimulating artistic vision and pointing to the unknowable line between dreams and reality. In “The Unknown Woman” (1906), Blok’s narrator is drinking and surrounded by drinkers in a scene of decadence and debauchery. This “atmosphere of drunkenness” is used to imbue the poem with a “purposeful lack of clarity”: in describing the woman of his vision—a prostitute—the narrator himself seems unsure whether she is “real or only part of a drunken dream” (Pratt 1986: 295–7). Absinthe was the drink of choice for turn-of-the-century intellectuals seeking to push the boundaries of perception. By the late nineteenth century, absinthe had acquired a sinister reputation in western Europe as a particularly intoxicating and dangerous drink, a reputation that numerous writers and artists famed for drinking it helped to foster. Absinthe and absinthe drinkers were the subject of several paintings by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Pablo Picasso—amongst others—conveying a sense of isolation, alienation from society, despair, and depression (Barrows 1987: 15; Baker 2001: 119–20, 132–3; Harrington 2003: 61–2). In “Absinthe: The Green Goddess” (1918), Aleister Crowley claimed absinthe produced a distinct kind of intoxication that, although burdening its “victims” with “a ghastly aureole all their own,” could “cleanse, fortify and perfume the human soul” and help the artist separate his perception from his physical self (Baker 2001: 14). In similarly ominous yet admiring tones, Oscar Wilde described how absinthe led its drinkers through layers of perception to a confrontation with the stark reality of existence: “After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world” (Baker 2001: 31). The terrible revelatory power of absinthe is conveyed memorably in Ernest Dowson’s prose poem “Absintha Taetra” (1899), where drinking absinthe takes the drinker through a journey of experience by turns magnificent, frightening, and humiliating, at the same time as leading him nowhere, with the repetitive refrains “He drank opaline” and “nothing was changed” (Baker 2001: 52–3).7 Other writers built alcohol’s role in establishing the artistic persona through altered perception into their narrative structures and linguistic forms. Rubén Campos, a Mexican writer who was part of a Spanish American literary movement known as modernismo—distinct from European and North American modernisms—depicted Mexico’s turn-of-the-century literary scene in his fictionalized memoir El bar (1935). The bohemian lifestyle of Mexico’s poets, novelists, and artists is depicted as centering on the “bar” (or cantina), and drinking heavily is associated with their spirit of “artistic inspiration and intellectual discovery.” The ups and downs of various intellectuals’ drinking careers, many of which result in premature death, are structurally intertwined with the narrative’s exploration of major political and cultural changes brought by the 1910 Revolution in Mexico. While the alcohol-fueled atmosphere of the “bar” is the birthplace of this literary generation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it also directly leads to its death, as various protagonists die as the Revolution begins to break out and a new cultural movement replaces the old (Toner 2015b: 172–7). James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses (1922), meanwhile, integrates the idea of alcohol facilitating artistic creativity into the novel’s linguistic techniques. Brooker has highlighted that the novel’s key formal principle is mimicking through language—both dialogue and narration—of the settings and experiences that are being

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Figure 8.4  “The Absinthe Drinker,” by Edgar Degas, 1876. Paris, Musée D’Orsay (Art Gallery). Image by DEA/G. Dagli Orti, DeAgostini via Getty Images.

described or performed. So, as the protagonists move through a “series of drinking places” in the second half of the novel, their words and deeds are expressed with increasing verbal extravagance, “as though the narrative voice is becoming gradually more tipsy along with Dublin itself” (Brooker 200: 108–9).

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The Drunken Self and Drinking Psychologies Earnshaw has argued that the drunken self became the subject of “serious artistic attention” in Europe and America from the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the figure of the “Existential drinker … who seeks to define an authentic self in the process of being repeatedly or continuously drunk” (2015: 204–7). Vincent Van Gogh’s “Night Café at Arles” (1888) depicts a melancholy scene of several individuals in a lower-end café, or grog-shop, that positions drinking as a means of breaking down, destroying, and potentially re-making the self, which is available only to those who consciously choose to abandon social and moral conventions through their “will to drink.” Jack London’s John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs (1913) similarly attributes to alcohol the power to expose the bleak truths at the heart of existence and, thus, to create an authentic self that exists in and through the knowledge of life’s meaninglessness (Earnshaw 2015: 206, 209–12. See also Crowley 1994: 19–21). In Ernest Hemingway’s work, meanwhile, drinking and drunkenness serve both to explore the inner constitution of individual selves and to restore to those selves some social purpose. Nicholls has noted that the ubiquity of drinking in many of Hemingway’s works is neither incidental nor merely indicative of the author’s relationship to alcohol as others have suggested, but is always involved in the working out of “existential identifications” within characters’ psyches and of “social relations” between characters. Moreover, these two

Figure 8.5  “The Night Café at Arles,” by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery. Image by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

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processes are often textually intertwined through drinking scenes and drunken conversations (2000b: 86–8). A pivotal scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) sees Robert Jordan, an American college professor working with a group of Republican guerrillas in the Spanish Civil War, usurp the authority of Pablo, the guerrillas’ leader, through a “ritualized drinking contest.” While the two men discuss the viability of Robert’s plan to blow up a strategically important bridge, Pablo pointedly refuses to offer Robert a cup of wine, and Robert then takes out a hipflask of absinthe, mixes it with water, and tells Pablo there isn’t enough left for him, before Pablo claims to dislike absinthe anyway. Drawing on the symbolic weight of absinthe as a drink of terrible power, embraced only by those fearless or determined enough to accept the dark revelations it can afford, this scene helps to establish Robert’s credentials as a man of true insight, leadership, and action (Nicholls 2000b: 90–7. See also Baker 2001: 145–6). Destructive patterns of alcohol use have also acted as the outward manifestations of inner psychological conflicts experienced by various literary characters. On the one hand, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) could be read as a fairly standard pro-temperance narrative, with Michael Henchard’s fall from a position of social and economic success being instigated by drinking. Swearing off alcohol for twenty-one years, following the drunken sale of his wife and child at a country fair, enables Henchard’s rise to prosperity, but his terrible mistake casts a long shadow. The complicated relationships that develop upon his wife and child’s return to Casterbridge lead to Henchard’s ruin, and exactly twenty-one years after swearing an oath of sobriety, Henchard starts drinking again. His decline into ill-health and social exile is swift, and he dies destitute and alone. Jane Lilienfield, however, has interpreted Henchard’s character and his drinking as being rooted in the psychology of dependency. Since Henchard’s need for human love appears to have been denied in childhood, he becomes dependent on alcohol to assuage feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing in a self-destructive cycle that culminates in the sale of his wife. Once he stops drinking, Henchard’s sense of validation is found instead in a succession of other things: hard work, economic success, his friendship with Farfrae, his relationship with his returned daughter. In their absence, at the end, Henchard returns to drink, signaling that the core psychological conflict in his character has not been resolved and his self-destructive pattern of behavior ends, this time, in death (Lilienfield 1999: 39–47). In John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra (1934), the central character Julian uses alcohol as a sublimated form of attack against his wife, his friends, and, ultimately, himself in a similarly self-destructive pattern that ends in suicide. The inner conflict driving Julian’s behavior is based in a feeling of emasculation and his drinking is closely intertwined with his attempts to assert sexual and social power over his wife Caroline. Knowing that his drinking causes her great social embarrassment, since he often flirts with other women, insults their friends, and even becomes violent under the influence of alcohol, Julian threatens to drink heavily at an upcoming party to manipulate Caroline into fulfilling a sexual fantasy in which she is extremely passive. When this manipulation goes awry, Julian fulfills his threat, behaves appallingly while drunk, and subsequently kills himself in a state of depression. While the text also suggests that Julian’s self-destructive behavior is fueled by a typically modernist “heightened sense of life’s futility,” the positioning of the marital sexual relationship as the trigger for Julian’s final drinking bout points to an ironic conflict at his core. Julian’s strongest

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desire is for power and control, central to his vision of masculinity, yet his response to feeling his power threatened—drinking—leads to a total loss of control over his own b ­ ehavior (Crowley 1994: 102–13). Denise Herd sees such a focus on unresolved psychological issues as a recurrent feature of cinematic representations of alcohol in 1950s melodrama. Central characters’ destructive patterns of drinking are indicative of “repressed and interiorized” personality conflicts that come to the surface during marital relationships and crises. Like Julian in Appointment in Samarra, male drinkers in these films are depicted as impotent in either literal or figurative senses. Consequently, they use alcohol to cover up such feelings or to create a rationalization for lashing out against those they feel are responsible for their lack of social, sexual, economic, or other prowess. Female drinkers, meanwhile, were typically depicted as neurotic, having immature or dependent personalities, and being unable to face reality. Again, they tend to use alcohol as a means of both masking these problems from themselves and of releasing frustrations about them (Herd 1986: 229–45; Cornes 2006: 191–220).

Conclusion As James Nicholls has observed, many scholarly studies on cultural representations of alcohol in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have concentrated on “the relationship between literary representation and alcohol as a source of addiction or on the role of particular narrative patterns in the process of recovery from addiction” (2000a: 12–13). In some respects, this has led to an under-appreciation of the complexities and ambiguities in the ways that various artists and writers examined alcohol and incorporated drinking into their work. There is an underlying assumption in some scholarship that all depictions of drinking were primarily making some comment about addiction. Some scholars use the term “alcoholism” rather loosely, attributing a condition of alcohol addiction to any literary scenes of drunkenness, and even mere drinking (see, for example, Warhol 2002: 105; Berman 2008: 175), while others apply specific models of alcoholism, or knowledge about authors’ drinking habits, to define various literary characters’ drinking behavior as addiction, where other interpretations are quite possible (see, for example, Gilmore 1987; Dardis 1990; Djos 2010). While alcoholism and addiction were certainly important, and new, subjects of artistic exploration in this time period, drink featured in a multitude of other ways. Alcohol had many “functions within fictions” in terms of narrative structure, linguistic technique, characterization, and underlying symbolic, philosophical principles (Nicholls 2000a: 12). Novels, poetry, plays, films, and art also depicted drinking itself from a variety of different perspectives, including—but not only—the perspectives of temperance and addiction, revealing that cultural representations of alcohol from 1850 to 1950 were remarkably complex.

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Notes Introduction 1 In international marketing at this time, the name “tequila” was not widely used; instead terms like “Mexican Whiskey” or “Mezcal Brandy” were more common to make the product more familiar to international judges. Tequila is one type of mezcal, spirits produced from the cooked hearts of agave plants, which is commonly produced across Mexico. Tequila is the name of a town and district in the state of Jalisco, which was (and is) a major production center. In this time period, increasing efforts to distinguish mezcal from Tequila as a distinctive product known as tequila were under way. Legal protections meaning that the name tequila can only be applied to mezcal from several states in western Mexico and produced from a specific type of agave (blue agave) in specific ways were introduced in the second half of the twentieth century (Gaytán 2014: 10, 39–40). 2 As Rebecca Earle (2014) has shown, such ideas were commonplace across Spanish America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and had deep roots in Spanish thinking about Indigenous peoples of the Americas since the sixteenth century.

Chapter 4 1 As a general rule, whiskey made in the United States and Ireland is spelled with an –ey, while whisky made in Scotland and Canada is spelled with a –y, although exceptions do exist.

Chapter 5 1 The hospitals in question were reported by Victor Horsley, physician, surgeon, and temperance reformer: they were St. Bartholomew’s, Guy’s, Middlesex, St. George’s, St. Mary’s, University College, and Westminster.

Chapter 6 1 In part of course these trends reflect much wider historiographic developments. Building from the important foundations of women’s history, gender history has produced much insight into histories of femininity, but also more recently into histories of masculinity. For further discussion, see Rose (2010).

Chapter 7 1 There is some evidence to suggest that this relationship has had an enduring legacy in the United States, affecting the alcohol consumption rates amongst different religious denominations. In a study conducted around the turn of the twenty-first century, US states with higher proportions of evangelical Protestants exhibited markedly lower overall alcohol consumption rates than states with higher proportions of Catholics. See Holt et al. (2006: 253–42).

Chapter 8 1 The marketing strategies increasingly employed by beer, wine, and distilled drinks industries unsurprisingly offered more unambiguously positive and celebratory images of alcohol from the late nineteenth century onwards. See Hames (this volume) for a summary of these advertising trends. 2 Susanna Barrows notes that nineteenth-century visual culture in France, especially paintings and advertisements, had a similarly dominant focus on the evils of drink (1987: 13). 3 The nostalgic idealization of past forms of alcohol-fueled male sociability was also a characteristic of Mexico’s Golden Age of cinema. Films from the late 1930s through to the 1950s often featured romanticized charro, or cowboy, protagonists, who regularly drank tequila as a release from the “turmoil of heartbreak or the constraints of daily life” (Gaytán 2014: 64–9). 4 The context of Prohibition was also fundamental to the development of the gangster movie genre. Although not commonly depicted as big drinkers themselves, the central gangster protagonist was similarly cast in a morally ambiguous and/or pathological light as the hard-boiled detective through his immersion in the criminal underworld of bootlegging, and his often meteoric rise through its ranks (Cornes 2006: 50–68). 5 In a similar, but less convincing, reading of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Catherine MacGregor analyses familial responses to alcoholic fathers within the narrative. She argues that Raskolnikov’s ultimately self-destructive actions can be read as being driven by the desire to “rescue” alcoholic characters and those adversely affected by their alcoholism, having internalized a sense of guilt and responsibility for the alcoholic’s behavior, and that his redemption only starts when he has accepted he is not responsible for, nor is he able to, control others’ behavior (1994: 26–33). 6 On this aspect of British Romanticism, see Taylor (1999) and Earnshaw (2000: 163–8). 7 Other writers poked fun at such portentous depictions of absinthe drinking and artistic perception. Robert Hichens’s The Green Carnation (1894), for instance, featured a memorable scene of two ladies drinking Bovril in secret after attending the opera and discussing its vice-like properties (Baker 2001: 36).

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Contributors Editor Deborah Toner is an associate professor of History at the University of Leicester. She is a social and cultural historian of alcohol, food, and identity in the Americas. She has published on drinking places, gender, medical discourse, and literary representations of alcohol in modern Mexico. Her current research examines the development and interaction of racial stereotypes about drinking in the United States and Mexico, and the history of substance use disorders in Guyana. She has been co-convenor of the Drinking Studies Network since 2010, an interdisciplinary research network connecting researchers of drink and drinking cultures across different societies and time periods.

Contributors Gina Hames is an associate professor of History at Pacific Lutheran University. Her research is focused on the historic role of how alcohol shapes identity from a comparative perspective across the globe, including Africa, China, Japan, India, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States. She is the author of Alcohol in World History (2012) and is currently researching the history of breweries in Belgium and champagne houses in France. James Kneale is a cultural and historical geographer with broad interests in nineteenthand twentieth-century drink and temperance, as well as in geographies of literature. He has published on historical geographies of both drinking places and ordinary temperance, focusing largely on the Anglophone world. His current research concerns the governmental and material networks of Anglophone life assurance companies and the way they brought together drink, temperance, statistical knowledge, and medicine between 1840 and 1940 in an attempt to govern “moderate drinking.” Dan Malleck is an associate professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Brock University and the director of Brock Centre for Canadian Studies. He is a medical historian specializing in drug and alcohol regulation and policy, and his books include Try to Control Yourself: The Regulation of Public Drinking in Post-Prohibition Ontario (2012) and When Good Drugs Go Bad: Opium, Medicine, and the Origins of Canada’s Drug Laws (2015). He is also the editor of a four-volume primary source collection Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020).

Andrew McMichael is a professor of History and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Auburn University at Montgomery. He is an historian of Revolutionary-era America and the Atlantic World, with a focus on the history of British colonial North America and its connections with Latin America and the Caribbean. He is currently researching the history of food and drink in the Americas, and around the world, particularly focusing on the history of alcohol consumption and commerce. Stella Moss is a historian of modern Britain at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her main research interests center on the history of popular culture and consumption in modern Britain, particularly the history of drinking cultures in the twentieth century. Her research examines the complex relationships linking consumption and identity within and across popular cultures, especially in terms of the influence of gender and age on recreational cultures, the creation and negotiation of social spaces, and contested attitudes toward respectability. Paul A. Townend is Professor of British and Irish History at UNC Wilmington, where he also serves as the Dean of Undergraduate Studies. He has published on aspects of Irish temperance history and the early history of temperance in the Atlantic World, including Father Mathew, Temperance and Irish Identity (2002), which won the James S. Donnelly prize in 2003 and “Mathewite Temperance in Atlantic Perspective,” in The Irish in the Atlantic World, edited by David Gleeson (2010). His recent work includes articles in Past and Present, Eire/ Ireland, a co-edited essay collection Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism and Subversion, edited by Tim McMahon, Michael DeNie, and Paul A. Townend (2017), and The Road To Home Rule: Anti-Imperialism and the Irish National Movement (2016), and has focused on populism and anti-imperialism. Sarah W. Tracy is Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor and Associate Professor of the History of Medicine and Food Studies at the University of Oklahoma Honors College. She is author of Alcoholism in America from Reconstruction to Prohibition (2007) and co-editor with Caroline Jean Acker of Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drugs in the United States, 1800–2000 (2004). Her work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Isis, Academic Medicine, and International History Review. Tracy directs the OU Medical Humanities Program. She is completing a book on nutritional physiologist, epidemiologist, and champion of the Mediterranean Diet, Ancel Keys.

220 Contributors

Index abkari system 12 Aboriginal peoples (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) 12, 52, 65, 85, 140 Absintha Taetra (Dowson) 189 absinthe 6, 11, 14, 20, 57, 68, 69, 77, 114–16, 140, 163, 164, 189, 190, 192, 195 n.7 absinthism 11 Acme Beer 102 addiction 2, 18, 110, 124, 126, 161, 175, 181, 184–7, 193 Adolph Coors Brewing Company 97 advertising 4, 38, 41, 87, 89–92, 94, 95, 100, 102, 104, 106–8 Africa 12, 13, 35–7, 44, 52, 85, 94 African Americans 52, 136, 171, 173, 177 African Bordeaux 36 aguardiente 13, 26 akpeteshie 59 Alabama 80 alcohol abuse 7, 8, 15, 38, 163, 168, 181, 183 Alcohol and Man-The Effects of Alcohol on Man in Health and Disease (Emerson) 113 Alcohol as Food and Medicine-A Paper from the Transactions of the International Medical Congress (Hunt) 118 Alcohol by Weight (ABW) 80 alcohol consumption 1–2, 5, 7–8, 11, 13–14, 18–19, 35, 40, 43–8, 53, 63, 65, 73, 109, 114, 116, 120, 131, 133–5, 142, 146, 151–4, 163, 171, 175–6, 179–80, 184, 188, 195 n.1. see also consumption alcoholics 14, 15, 125, 130, 184, 187 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) 2, 18, 121, 123, 124, 187 alcohol interest 157, 164

alcoholism 1, 2, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 18–20, 50, 77, 81, 83, 110, 121–31, 161, 162, 168, 170, 172, 175, 180–7, 193 and degeneration 181–3 and modernity 184–5 alcohol policy 12, 13, 63, 65, 74 alcohol revenue system 73 Alcott, L. M. 178 ale 88, 113, 118 Alexander III, C. 94 Alexander III, T. 73 Alexander II, T. 73 Alexander Nevskii Temperance Society 160 Allen, F. 114 American alcohol production 26–9, 33–4 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 124 American Association for the Cure of Inebriates, The (AACI) 110, 122, 129 American Can Co. 100 American Civil War 28 American Medical Association (AMA) 118, 120 American Medical Temperance Association (AMTA) 120 American Renaissance (literature) 178 American Spirits Manufacturing Company 91 ancillary industries 29, 40 Angel Guerra (1890–91) 183 Angoulvant, G. 172 Anheuser-Busch 32, 88, 89, 102 Anti-Alcohol Federation (FAI) 119 anti-alcohol movements 1–3, 5–10, 12, 14, 19, 20, 40, 77, 81, 83, 119, 127, 155, 156, 160, 161, 163, 168, 170, 171, 173, 178 Anti-Saloon League (ASL) 6, 8, 72, 79, 127, 156, 157, 159, 165, 166, 179 anxieties 1, 116, 141, 142, 147, 148, 154, 163

aperitif 38, 53 aphrodisiac (alcohol as) 146, 149 Apollinaire, G. 188 appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) 4, 107 Appointment in Samarra (1934) 192, 193 aquavit 84 architecture 145 Argentina 4, 6, 23, 94 Armagnac 4, 107 art 26, 99, 188, 193 Arthur, T. S. 176 artificial fermentation 24 artificial refrigeration 3, 22, 29 Asquith, H. 66 assommoir 55 asylum 18, 110, 122, 123, 128–30, 155, 170 Australia 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 22, 48, 50, 52, 54, 85, 94, 110, 122, 123, 128, 133, 138–40, 143, 144, 156, 157, 159, 167, 172, 173 Austria 47, 75, 170 authenticity 4, 28 Auto City Brewing 102 Bacardi 106 Bacchus 188 Baltimore 89 Banyuls 4, 107 barley 24, 97 barmaids 66, 143 Baron, S. 22, 26 barrels 22, 27–9, 31, 32, 88, 90, 104 barroom games 137–8 barroom lore 136, 151 bars 5–6, 11, 16, 53, 56, 59, 80, 106, 134–5, 138–40, 142–3, 145–6, 148–51, 170 batch-distilling 22 Baudelaire, C. 188 Bavaria 4, 24, 88 Bavarian-styled beer 4, 88 Beam, J. 105 Beard, G. M. 126 Beaulieu winery 107 Beecher Stowe, H. 177, 186 beer advertising 103, 104 Bavarian-styled 4, 24, 88 beerhalls 11, 58, 59, 61, 62 beerhouse 56 high-quality 29–30 industry 4, 88, 90, 94, 100, 102

222 Index

market 88 parlours 52, 61 production 4–5, 17, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 100, 158 Sweden 84 war 59 Beer Act, 1830 (UK) 66 beerhouses 56 beershops 50, 55 Belgium 47, 55, 68, 96, 135 Belle Époque 56, 135 betel 44 beverage rooms 80, 148 Bi-Chloride of Gold (Keeley) 110, 128 Bierkrieg, 1909 53 Big Four 105 Billings, J. S. 119, 127 binge 52, 186 Birnam, D. 186 Birth of a Nation (1915) 177 blended whiskey 28, 90, 91, 105 Blind Pigs 62 Blok, A. 189 Blue Monday 53 Blue Ribbon Movement 122 Board of License Commissioners (Ontario) 70 Boer War 14, 170 Bogart, H. 180 bohemia 68, 189 Bolsheviks 46, 81, 97 Bolton (England) 53–5, 186 Booth, C. 56 bootlegging 74, 79, 98, 195 n.4 Bordeaux 4, 32, 36, 95, 99, 107 Boston 28, 59, 62, 104, 109, 114 Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 1909 113 Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 28 Bottle, The (Cruikshank) 161, 162 bottle washing 29 bottling 3, 29, 88 bourbon 27, 28, 105 branding 19, 89 brandy 22, 23, 57, 91, 109, 111, 116, 117, 119, 140 Bratt, I. 84 Bratt system 84 breweries 3, 16, 17, 22, 28–33, 56, 75, 80, 83, 86–90, 96, 97, 100, 102, 104, 167, 171 Brewer’s Union No. 1 (later Brewer’s, Beer Drivers, and Maltsters Union) 89

Brewer’s Warehouse Corporation (Canada) 80 brewing 3, 4, 21–6, 28, 32, 35, 39, 40, 44, 62, 81, 87, 88, 96, 97, 100, 102, 104, 110, 167 Brewing Corporation of Canada (later, Canadian Breweries Ltd) 100 Brideshead Revisited (1945) 181 Britain 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 14–17, 19, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 55, 57, 60–2, 74–9, 82, 83, 85, 86, 100, 109–11, 113, 121, 122, 126, 133, 153, 154–6, 163–7, 170, 171, 173, 181, 184 British Caribbean 10, 26 British Columbia 46, 70, 80 British Medical Journal 117–18 British North America Act (1867) 68, 70 Brussels Conference, 1890 10, 36, 85, 86 Buchanan, J. 90 Budweiser 102 Buenos Aires 4, 6 Buganda 58 Bulgaria 7, 9 Burgundy 38, 99 Burton brewing 4 Cabernet Sauvignon 107 cafés 6, 55, 56, 60, 67, 79, 135, 140 Cairo 52 California 27, 94, 96, 99, 102, 107, 117 Campo, Á. de 181 Campos, R. 189 Canada 9–11, 15, 16, 18, 28, 45, 52, 61, 68–70, 72, 74, 78–83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 96, 97, 100, 108, 110, 121, 122, 128, 133, 143, 147, 154, 166, 172 Canada Temperance Act, 1878 70 Canadian Club whiskey 105 canning 100, 101 Cape of Good Hope 48 Capone, Al 98 capping 21 Caribbean 10, 21, 23, 26, 27 Carling Brewery 89 Carling’s Imperial Club Lager 89 Carlsberg 26, 83, 84 Catherine the Great 73 Catholicism 158, 159, 172 Catholic temperance 159, 160 Catholic Total Abstinence Union (CTAU) 159, 160, 167, 171 CCB. see Central Control Board (CCB)

Central America 44, 59 Central Control Board (CCB) 17, 39, 57, 61, 75, 76, 142 champagne (beverage) 95, 96, 99, 106, 107 Champagne (region) 4, 38, 95, 96, 99, 107 charros 195 n.3 chateau 95 chemicals 33 chemical war 33 Cherrington, E. 113, 123 Chicago 5, 22, 24, 28, 29, 53, 59, 62, 97, 98, 104 China 147 Chippewa Falls 29 Chittenden, R. H. 120 Christian 8, 51, 153 and secular influences 154–66 Christianity 10, 128, 154, 160, 172 Christian Moerlein Brewing Company 97 church 7–9, 52, 68, 83, 122, 125, 155, 157, 159, 160, 166, 172, 179, 180, 183 cider 68, 77–9 Cincinnati 97, 98 cinema (as leisure pursuit) 5, 19 cinema (representations of alcohol in) 193 Claret 117 Clotel (1853) 177 Club and Institute Union (Britain) 61 Clubs 61 cocainism 127 cocktails 98, 105–7, 112, 146, 147 Coffey, A. 22–3, 90 Coffey still 23 Cognac 4, 107 cold liquid diet 113 colonialism 9–14, 172–3 column stills 22, 23, 27, 90, 91, 105 Combrune, M. 23, 24 Comité National des appellations d’origine (CNAO) 107 commerce 87, 108 1850–1914 87–96 1914–33 96–9 1933–50 100–7 Commissariat for the Struggle against Alcoholism and Gambling 81 Committee of Fifty 119, 120 competitive drinking 137, 143 compression refrigeration 22 consciousness 56, 89, 167, 170, 171, 175, 181, 186–93 Conservative Licensing Act, 1904 66

Index 223

consumption 43–5 drinkers 48–52 drinking and 52–62 habits 3, 47, 52, 104, 139, 140, 151, 188 rates 45–8 continuous still 87 controlled designation of origin. see appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) Coors Brewing 40, 97 cork 21, 102 Côte d’Ivoire 36, 94, 135, 172 courtship 134, 147 Coward, N. 98 Crawford, J. 106 crime, alcohol-related 6, 8, 11, 16, 45, 98, 156, 171, 178, 181, 183 Crime and Punishment (1866) 195 n.5 Crooks Act 70 Crowley, A. 189 Crown Royal Canadian whiskey 105 Cruikshank, G. 161, 162 Cuba 26 cultural representations 175, 193 alcoholism and degeneration 181–3 alcoholism and modernity 184–5 alcoholism, denial, and recovery 185–7 drunken consciousness 187–93 temperance and prohibition 175–80 Curse of Drink, The (1922) 176 Cuyo (Argentina) 23 Dar es Salaam 61 Daring Love (1924) 176 Davis, N. S. 120 Days of Wine and Roses (1962) 187 débits de boissons 57, 58 decadence 184, 189 decor (bars) 138, 144 Dedalus, S. 179, 180, 187 Degas, E. 189, 190 degeneration 1, 2, 7, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19, 83, 116, 133, 170, 172, 173, 181–4 delirium tremens 181 Dempsey, J. 98 denial 186–7 Denmark 15, 18, 83–4, 86, 122, 128 dependency 9, 73, 126, 192 depression 37, 40, 46, 47, 96, 98, 107, 181, 189, 192 Detroit 89, 102, 104 deviance 181 Dewar, J. 91–3

224 Index

Dewars distillery 90 diabetes 19, 114, 121, 125 Dickens, C. 181 Dickinson, E. 188 dipsomania 125–7, 129 disease 2, 4, 8, 18, 20, 21, 33, 109, 110, 113, 114, 120–2, 124–30, 161, 181, 183, 184, 187 Disease Concept of Alcoholism, The (Jellinek) 128 disinterested management 11, 17, 61, 65, 66, 72, 75, 76, 84. see also Gothenburg system dispensary system 72 distillation 3, 44, 73, 81, 83–4 distilled spirits 10, 12, 13, 16, 28, 38, 44, 63, 73, 77, 84, 94, 96, 105, 116, 172 Distilled Spirits Institute 105 distilleries 5, 17, 22, 26, 27, 33, 39–41, 48, 80, 87, 90, 91, 98, 104–6 Distillers’ and Cattle Feed Trust 90 Distillers Company, Ltd (DCL) 17, 22, 39–41, 90, 91, 97, 105 distilling 3, 17, 24, 27, 35, 81, 84, 87, 97, 104, 105, 167 distribution 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 33, 65, 72, 120 diversification 17, 40 domesticity 187 Dominion Licensing Act 70 Dominion of Canada 68 dopamine hypothesis 110 Dostoyevsky, F. 195 n.5 Dow, N. 71 Dowson, E. 189 dram shops 55 drinkers 48–52 drinking and consumption 52–62 drinking cultures 133–4, 151–2 femininity and 140–4 masculinity and 134–40 mixed-gender drinking and sexualities 144–51 drinking psychologies 191–3 drunken consciousness 56, 89, 167, 170, 171, 175, 181, 186–93 drunkenness (female) 142 drunkenness (habitual) 2, 109, 121, 122, 125–7, 130, 134, 155, 181, 186 drunkenness (male) 135, 142, 151 drunken self 191–3 Dublin 57, 141, 142, 158, 179, 190 Duckworth, G. H. 56

Duma 73, 74 Duminy & Co. champagne advertisement 95 Dunkin Act 68, 70 Dunlop, J. 53 Duoro (Portugal) 32 Durban 61 ebirabo 58 Edinburgh 145, 148 Ehret Brewery 29, 31 Ehret, G. 31 Eighteenth Amendment 78, 96, 98, 120, 127 Eisteddfods 43 El bar (1935) 189 elections 19, 52 electrification 88 Eliot, G. 178 Emerson, H. 113, 114 Emerson, R. W. 188 empire 9–14 employee assistance programs (EAPs) 130 Enemy Sex, The (1924) 176 England 10, 21, 22–5, 27, 44, 50, 51, 53, 56, 65–8, 75, 91, 104, 121, 127, 128, 135, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 172, 175, 188 Europe 15, 16, 20, 21, 23–7, 32–8, 40, 41, 43, 46, 47, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96–8, 102, 106, 109, 110, 116, 122, 128, 130, 136, 153, 170, 184, 189, 191 European imperialism 94 evangelical beliefs 10, 155, 156 existentialism 182, 186 factories 4, 21, 28, 36, 39, 41, 50, 53, 61, 75, 81, 101, 130, 135, 142 family 19, 27, 32, 52, 55, 58, 84, 97, 105, 142, 143, 145, 153, 155, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167, 175, 177, 183, 186, 187 fatalism 182 Faulkner, W. 181 Federal Alcohol Administration (US) 102 Felix Holt (1866) 178 fellowship 140 female drinkers 142, 147, 193 drinking 133, 143, 148 inebriety 126 femininity 133, 134, 146, 148, 150–2 and drinking cultures 140–4 fermentation 3, 22–6, 35, 88, 94, 157 fertilization 24

festivals 9, 19, 38, 52, 96, 155, 170 Fields, A. 8 film 16, 18, 162, 163, 176–9, 187, 193 Finland 15, 46, 84, 128 First World War 3, 14, 16–18, 27–9, 31, 32, 37, 38, 40, 46, 47, 57, 59, 61, 65, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74, 78, 84, 86, 87, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104, 107, 108, 116, 130, 135, 142, 167, 170, 171, 185 Fitzgerald, F. S. 98, 181, 184, 187 flappers 148 Foolish Matrons, The (1921) 176 Forel, A. 7 fortified wine 27 Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87) 183 For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) 18, 192 France 4–7, 10, 14–15, 18, 26, 32–5, 37–8, 49–50, 53, 55, 57, 63, 67–8, 74, 77–8, 83, 94–6, 99, 107, 111, 116, 120–3, 135, 163, 167–8, 170, 181, 188, 195 n.2 Franco-Prussian War 14, 67, 116, 170 free licensing 66 French Caribbean 10, 26 French Martinique 26 French wine 11, 34, 38, 41, 99, 107, 116, 172, 173 friendship 11, 50, 149, 192 funerals 19, 52, 142 Gallant, B. 98 gambling 81, 137, 139, 155, 183 Gamboa, F. 181, 183 gangster movie genre 16, 195 n.4 Garies and their Friends, The (1857) 177 gentlemen’s clubs 61–2 Georgia (US) 80 German-American 55, 171 German immigration 88, 94 Germany 10, 14, 16, 18, 36, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 75, 96, 99, 113, 120, 123, 135, 170 Gershwin, G. 98 Ghana 13, 135, 173 Ghartey IV, King 173 Gilbert and Parsons Hygienic Whiskey for Medicinal Use, advertisement 112 gin 17, 36, 44, 59, 91, 146 gin palace 56, 57 Gladstone, W. 66 Glasgow 56, 148 Goebel Brewery 104 Gold Coast 13, 52, 59, 94, 173

Index 225

Gothenburg system 66, 84 grain 15–17, 23, 35–7, 40, 41, 73, 81, 88, 96, 102 Grant, U. S. 117 grapes 32, 37, 38, 91, 96, 99, 107, 157 Great Britain 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 109, 110, 122 Great Fire of 1871 (Chicago) 22, 28 Great War 139, 142–4 Green Carnation, The (1894) 195 n.7 Green Crescent Temperance Society, The 8 Griffith, D. W. 177 Guardianship of Public Sobriety, The 73 Guatemala 13, 51 Guinness 17, 24, 88, 96, 97, 102, 104, 143 Guinness, B. L. 89 Habitual Drunkards Act 122 habitual drunkenness 2, 109, 121, 122, 125–7, 130, 134, 155, 181, 186 Haggard, H. 125, 128 Haigs distillery 90 hallucinations 176, 181, 184 Hammett, D. 180 Hamm’s brewery 29, 102 Handsome Lake 173 hard-boiled detective 178, 195 n.4 Hardy, T. 181, 192 Hawthorne, N. 178 Heaven Hill distillery 105 hedonism 159, 187 Heileman brewery 29 Hell Gate Brewery 31 Hemingway, E. 18, 98, 179, 185, 191 hereditary inebriate 126 heterosexuality 148–9 heterosociality 145, 146 Heublein Spirits Co. 106 Hichens, R. 195 n.7 high license 59, 62, 65, 71 Hiram Walker distillery 98, 105 Hirschfeld, M. 112–13 Hobson, R. P. 15 Hollywood 106, 107, 146 Holy Monday 53 home brewing 62 homemade wine 96 homosexuality 148–50 homosociality 61 hops 3–4 Horseshoe & Wheatsheaf public house 57 hotels 16, 50, 79, 80 Hunt, E. M. 118–19

226 Index

Huss, M. 110, 121 hydrometer 88, 90 hygiene 18, 107, 119 hygienic drinks 68 hysteria 18, 107, 119 ice 22, 29, 88, 100 Iceland 15, 84 Iceman Cometh, The (1939) 186 identity 3, 11, 19, 32, 38, 73, 89, 110, 116, 117, 124, 126, 131, 135, 136, 140, 149–51, 180, 185–8 Illinois 72, 90, 110, 165 immigration 6, 88, 94, 122 imperialism 9, 11, 12, 20, 63, 84, 85, 94, 151 improved houses (improved pubs) 8, 17–18, 56, 61, 76, 145 Independent Order of Good Templars 121 India 2, 4, 7, 9–12, 20, 53, 171, 172 industrial alcohol 6, 14, 17, 35, 37, 53, 57, 77, 83, 104, 105 industrialization 3–9 industry trends 26–35 inebriety movement 110, 121, 122, 125–30 infidelity 186 innovation 3, 14, 34, 41, 71, 72, 87, 88, 94, 101, 105, 108 inns 172 inspiration (artistic) 189 intemperance 55, 109, 121, 123, 125–8, 136 intoxication 43, 61, 121, 133, 134, 137–40, 147, 154, 163, 177, 187–9 Investigations Concerning the Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem (Billings) 119, 127 Iran 51 Ireland 6, 7, 18, 44, 62, 88, 89, 96, 102, 121, 156–60, 171, 178, 179 Irish Americans 159, 171 Irish literary revival 179 Irish whiskey distilleries 91 Is Alcohol a Danger for Italy, 1909 119 Islam 7, 8, 51, 172 Italy 4, 5, 32, 33, 48, 94, 119 Ivan the Terrible 73 Jackson, C. 186 Jamaica 10, 27 Janet’s Repentance (1857) 178 Japan 4, 18, 156 Jellinek, E. M. 125, 128

jerries 62 Joe Beef 59 Johannesburg 61 John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs (1913) 184, 191 John Dewar and Sons distillery 91 Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company 33 Joslin, E. 114 Journal of the American Medical Association. 1896 113 Joyce, J. 179, 187, 189 Kabaks 73 Kansas 29, 72, 80 kava 44 Keeley Cure 128, 129 Keeley, L. E. 110, 128, 129 keg lined cans 100 kegs 21, 29, 88 Kentucky 27, 40, 90, 91, 105 Kentucky Distilleries and Warehouse Co. 91 Kenya 58, 135 King, W. L. M. 82 Ku Klux Klan 171 labour 35 Labour Campaign for the Public Ownership and Control of the Liquor Trade, The 167 L’absinthe allegory, 1883 164 La fortune des Rougon (1871) 182 lager 4, 22, 55, 88 Lagos 36, 37 laissez-faire 59, 65, 66, 68, 86 Lang, J. D. 159 Languedoc 99 La Rumba (1890–91) 181 L’Assommoir (1877) 181–2 Latin America 2–4, 13, 14, 20, 181 Latour, G. de 107 law enforcement 179, 180 Leake, C. 127 Leeuwenhoek, A. van 23 Legrain, P. -M. 123 Leicester 62 Leinekugel brewery 29–30 Les débits de boissons au Champ-de-Mars, Paris, 1879 58 Lewis, S. 98 liberalism 11, 17, 24, 43, 47, 57, 59, 62, 66, 80–3, 146, 147, 149–51, 160, 165, 167, 171, 184 Licensed Victuallers Defence League 66

licensing 6, 12, 15, 16, 19, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 65–76, 80, 83, 85, 86, 139, 143, 147, 157, 165, 167 Licensing Act, 1872 (Britain) 66 Licensing Act, 1876 (Ontario, aka Crooks Act) 70 Licensing Act, 1921 (Britain) 75 Licensing Bill, 1908 66 Liebig, J. von 111 Ligue nationale contre l’alcooholisme 68 Liquor Control Board of Ontario 80 liquor control systems 80 liquor policy 74, 81, 82, 86 Little Women (1868–69) 178 liver disease 181 Liverpool 56 Lloyd George, D. 75, 170 local option 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 80, 84, 157, 162, 166 logos 89 London 24, 25, 49, 56, 57, 61, 75, 100, 113, 122, 145, 150 London, J. 184, 191 Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956) 186 Los Angeles 106 Lost Weekend, The (1944, novel) 186 Lost Weekend, The (1945, film) 187 Loubére, L. 37 lounge 56, 143–7 Lowry, M. 18, 184 machismo 102, 136, 139 Mackies distillery (White Horse) 90 Magnan, V. 181 Maine 71, 72, 122 Maine Law, 1851 157 male drinkers 141, 176, 193 drinking 133, 134, 140, 151, 176 Maltese Falcon, The (1930) 180 malting 24 Maltsters 21, 89 Manchester 56, 150 Manet, É. 189 Manitoba 70 Maori 85 Mariani, A. 117 marriage 142, 184, 187 Martinique 10, 26 Martin, John 106 masculinity 3, 6, 91, 133–5, 138–40, 148, 150–2, 193 and drinking 134–40

Index 227

mash 21, 22 Massachusetts 71, 109, 111, 113, 122, 126, 129, 130, 154 Massachusetts General Hospital 109, 111, 113 Mass-Observation 54–5 material culture 48, 134, 138, 140, 144 maternal drinking 141 Mathew, Father 121, 156–9, 171 Mayor of Casterbridge, The (1886) 181, 192 mechanical refrigeration 22, 87, 88 mechanization 37, 88 Médecins amis des vins de France (MAVF) 116 medicinal drinking 40, 98, 110, 113, 116, 117, 119 melodrama 175, 176, 178, 193 Melville, H. 178 mental illness 8, 14 merchants 28, 36, 106, 117 Mexican revolution 8, 9, 189 Mexican Temperance Society 8 Mexico 4–5, 7–9, 14, 15, 18, 53, 59–61, 106, 110, 121, 128, 155, 168, 170, 181, 184, 188, 189 microorganisms 23, 24, 127 middle class 6, 40, 50, 56, 60, 87, 95, 102, 116, 145, 167, 173, 178, 183 milling 21 Milwaukee 22, 28, 29, 33, 102, 104 Minnesota 11, 12, 81, 102 Mississippi 80 mixed drinking 55, 143–6 mixed-gender drinking and sexualities 144–51 moderationism 65, 83, 86 modern alcoholism movement 121, 123–5, 128 modernism 189 modernismo (Spanish America) 189 modernity 2, 4, 7, 18–20, 43, 51, 121, 146, 181, 184, 188 Molson brewery 97 Mombasa 58, 61 Monroe, M. 107 moonshine 178 Moon Under Water, The (1946) 178 Morel, B. 14, 181 Morgan, J. 106, 176 morphinism 127 Moscow 46, 106 Moulton, F. R. 124 Mount Vernon (rye whiskey) 105

228 Index

Mowat, O. 68, 86 Mr Gilfil’s Love Story (1857) 178 mortality, alcohol-related 50 munitions 17, 39, 75, 142 music 59, 61, 96, 102, 144–6 muslims 7, 11, 36, 37, 51, 52 My Wife and I (1871) 186 Nairobi 61 Napa Valley Wine Technical Group 107 Narragansett Brewery 104 narratives, temperance 175–6 National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (NCEA) 18, 125 National Committee for the Struggle Against Alcoholism 8 National Distillers 105 nationalism 3, 33, 153, 170–2, 180 nationalization 39, 167 National Licensing Commission 76 national Patent 70 Native Americans 10, 52, 173 natural fermentation 24 near beer 97 Neff, I. 129 Netherlands 47 neurasthenia 126 neuroticism 193 Neutral Spirit, The (Rouché) 121 Newark 89 New Brunswick 70 New Economic Policy (NEP) 81 New Orleans 21 New South Wales (Australia) 10, 48, 54, 85, 159 newspapers 15, 162, 165, 175 New York 22, 27–9, 71, 80, 81, 89, 98, 104, 110, 114, 121, 123, 124 New York State Inebriate Asylum 123 New Zealand 48, 54, 85, 172 Nicholas II, T. 73, 74 Nigeria 12, 13, 35–7, 52, 94 “Night Café at Arles” (Van Gogh) 191 nightclubs 36, 98, 150 Nkrumah, K. 13 North America 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 24, 37, 43, 61, 78, 85, 105, 110, 122, 153, 155, 163 North Carolina 80, 155 North Dakota 80, 81 Norway 15, 16, 46, 84 nostalgia 4, 184 Nova Scotia 70

OBSA. see Society for the Struggle against Alcoholism, The (OBSA) O’Casey, S. 179 October Revolution (Russia), 1905 73 off-licenses 75 O’Hara, J. 192 Ohio 27, 72, 97, 117, 141 Oklahoma 80 Old Crow (bourbon) 105 Oldenburg, R. 44, 55 Old Overholt (rye whiskey) 105 Old Taylor (bourbon) 105 O’Neill, E. 186 Ontario 51, 68, 70, 78, 80, 86, 89, 100, 143, 148 opening times (drinking establishments)/regulation of 8, 36, 62, 73, 98, 148, 172 organized crime 16, 98, 171 Orwell, G. 178 Ottawa 51, 100 Ottoman empire 7, 8, 51, 55 overproduction 77, 78, 91 Pabst 22, 29, 30, 104 packaging 3, 21, 100, 102 palm wine 35, 36, 52, 172 palm wine “gin” 36 Papua New Guinea 44 Paris 49, 53, 56, 62, 98, 116, 140 Parrish, J. 125–6 Partition of Africa 35 pasteurization 21, 27, 29, 87, 88, 94 Pasteur, L. 21, 24–6, 94 Patent or Proprietary Medicines Act, 1908 (Canada) 70 patent still 22, 23 pathology 126, 146, 180, 183 patriotism 17, 40, 54, 102, 128, 142, 171 patrons 50, 54, 59, 61, 76, 94, 119, 137, 138, 143, 145, 147, 149, 150 Pearl Harbor 41, 105 Pennsylvania 72 Peoria 105 Pérez Galdós, B. 182, 183 performativity 5, 6, 134, 136–9, 160, 175, 186, 190 performing arts 175 periodic inebriate 126 Permissive Prohibition Bill 66 perpendicular drinking 56, 138, 139 pH 24, 90 Pharmacopoeia of the United States of America 116–19

Philadelphia 28, 89, 94, 125, 159, 177 Philadelphia, 1876 Centennial Exhibition 94 Phillip Best Brewing Company 22 Philosophy of Intemperance (Parrish) 125–6 phylloxera 4, 33, 34, 38, 41, 87, 91, 94, 96, 107 Picasso, P. 188, 189 Pickwick Papers, The (1836) 181 pinard 116, 135 Piper-Heidsieck champagne 107 pleasure 114, 188 port 32, 52, 99 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) 187 Portugal 32, 33, 99 pot still 22, 23 poverty 6, 11, 122, 138, 167, 168, 181, 183 preservation 3, 22, 117 Prince Edward Island 70 prison 16, 155 production 21, 41 Africa 35–7 industry trends 26–35 scientific advances 23–6 technological changes 21–3 war effort 37–41 professionalization 24 progressivism (US, Canada) 1, 8, 15, 27, 40, 70, 96, 151, 156, 166, 177, 181, 183, 186 Prohibition 195 n.4 Prohibition (New Zealand) 85 Prohibition (Africa) 13, 86 Prohibition (Canada) 61, 78–81, 97, 108 Prohibition (Finland) 15 Prohibition (Norway) 16 Prohibition (Russia) 74, 81–2, 97 Prohibition (Sweden) 84 Prohibition (US) 2, 14, 16, 78–81, 87, 97, 98, 108, 110, 117, 127, 130, 161, 166, 171 Prohibition Party 72, 127, 163, 165 Proprietary Medicines Act 70 prostitution 11, 134, 148, 150, 163, 181 Protestantism 155, 157, 160, 166, 173 psychiatry 126 psychology 125, 126, 133, 159, 185, 186, 192 pub 17–19, 50, 54–7, 61, 75, 76, 106, 138, 139, 142–5, 147, 150, 167, 178, 179 public houses 49, 51, 57, 75, 134, 138, 142–5, 150, 178

Index 229

public policy 122 pulque 59–60, 121 pulquerías 53, 59, 60 Pure Food and Drug Act, 1906 28, 117 Pylon (1935) 181 Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 125 Quebec 68, 70, 78–80 Queensland 54 queer venues 149 race 2, 7, 13, 48, 52, 85, 151, 177 temperance and 176–8 racialized stereotypes (of drinking) 179 radio 9, 18, 100, 102, 104, 108 railroad 3, 5, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 32, 41, 88, 90 raki 51, 52 realism 186 recreation 1, 5, 52, 128, 134, 136, 138, 144, 145, 149, 155, 159 rectifiers 27, 28 Redfern Inn, The 76 red wine 99, 117, 119 refrigeration 3, 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 41, 87, 88 regime des boissons 67–8, 77 Remus, G. 98 repression 55, 187 Research Council on Problems of Alcohol (RCPA) 123–5 respectability 142, 143–5, 147, 159 restaurants 16, 59, 74, 84 retailers 28, 45, 67, 158 Rhode Island 104 Rhodes, C. 52 Richardson, B. W. 111 riesling 99 Rimbaud, A. 188 rites of passage 19, 43, 52, 53 ritual 19, 52, 53, 98, 136–40, 146, 160, 192 romanticism 4, 27, 91, 186 Rosensteil, L. 105 Rosenthal, L. 40 Ross, W. 90 Rouché, B. 121, 128 Roueché, B. 109, 131 rounds 50, 137, 138 Royal Blend whisky advertisement 92 Royal Commission on Licensing, 1897 66 Rozhdestvenskii, A. V. 160 rum 9, 10, 21, 23, 26, 27, 35, 36, 106, 110, 116, 171

230 Index

Rush, B. 109, 121, 154, 155 Russell, J. 165 Russia 7, 15, 19, 43, 46, 49–53, 55, 62, 73–4, 81–2, 86, 94, 97, 135, 142, 160, 168, 188 Russian Revolution 81 Russo-Japanese war 14, 73 rye 28, 105 sacramental exception 157, 166 saint-lundi 53 Saint Monday 50, 53, 54 St. Louis 28, 88, 89 St Petersburg 46, 160 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre 98 saloons 5, 6, 11, 12, 29, 30, 36, 50, 53–6, 59, 61, 62, 72, 83, 104, 116, 120, 127, 136–9, 143, 146, 148, 156, 163, 165, 177, 179, 184 sanctification 156 Sanderson, W. (VAT69) 90 San Francisco 149, 150 sanitization 24 Santa (1901) 181, 183 Scandinavia 6, 46, 61, 63, 83–4, 86, 109, 121, 128, 154, 166 Schandein 22 Schenley Distillers Corporation 40, 105 Schivelbusch, W. 44 Schlitz Beer advertisement 103 Schlitz Brewing 102 Schlitz, J. 32, 33, 102, 103 Schnyder, L. 119 scientific advances 23–6 scientification 24 Scientific Temperance 119 scientists 8, 24, 26, 33, 120, 127 Scotch whisky 39, 90, 91, 93 Scotland 18, 39, 62, 66, 76, 91, 121 Scottish whiskey 22, 23 Scramble for Africa 35 Seagram, J. 98, 105 Seagram’s distillery 105 Second World War 6, 15–18, 37–41, 47, 74, 82–3, 87, 100, 102, 104–6, 108, 116, 117, 123, 146, 150, 152 self-control 10, 11, 135, 168, 187 self-deception 186 self-destruction 184 self-help movement 159 selfhood 187 self-pity 186 service des alcools 77

Seven Crown American blended whiskey 105 sexuality 133, 134, 146, 148 mixed-gender drinking and 144–51 Shah, Nasir al-Din 51 Sharp v Wakefield 66 shebeens 62 sherry 99 shipping 3, 29, 32, 34, 39, 88, 90, 102 Sigsworth, E. M. 24, 25 Silas Marner (1861) 178 Silkworth, W. 124 simple inebriate 126 slavery 2, 10, 155, 173, 177 S. Liebmann’s Sons Brewing Company 22 Smirnoff vodka 106 Smirnov, P. 94, 97 Smith, R. 130 smuggling 11, 62, 78, 79, 108 sobriety 6, 10, 18, 53, 73, 121, 124, 133, 159, 160, 167, 168, 172, 175, 176, 179, 186–8, 192 sociability 3, 5, 11, 12, 44, 61, 134–6, 138, 140, 143–6, 149, 150, 156, 167, 168, 170, 179, 184, 195 n.3 socialism 66, 81, 153, 166–70 Society for the Struggle against Alcoholism, The (OBSA) 81 Soho 150 soldiers 12, 17, 38, 77, 91, 96, 99 South Carolina Dispensary 72 Southern Nigeria 12–13, 37, 94 Southern Rhodesia 61 Soviet Union 81 Spain 4, 7, 14, 32, 33, 94, 99, 182, 183 Spanish Caribbean 26 Spanish Civil War 18, 192 speakeasies 98, 107, 145–6, 178, 180 special legislation 70 spirits 3, 5, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 26–8, 32, 34, 36–8, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 57, 60, 62, 63, 66, 75, 77–9, 81, 84, 87, 90, 94, 96, 98, 100, 104, 106, 108, 113, 114, 116, 117, 158, 163, 170, 172 spoilage 35 sports 96, 102, 104 SPTAS 159 Standard Distilling and Distributing Company 91 Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem (Cherrington) 113 Star (workers’ cooperative brewery, Den-

mark) 80, 84 State Vodka Monopoly 14, 73, 74 steam engine 26, 90 steam-powered mills 3–5, 21 Stevens, G. 177 stills 22, 23, 27, 39 Stitzel, F. 90 Stockholm 84 storage 3, 21, 22, 24, 90 Storer, H. 127 stout 143 Stroh’s brewery 29 sugar 10, 21, 24, 26–7, 146 sugarcane 13 suicide 163, 192 Sultan Abdulmecid 51 Sun Also Rises, The (1922) 18, 179, 185 supportive nutrient 111 Sweden 18, 65, 83, 84, 121, 128, 156 Swedish Temperance Society 84 Switzerland 18, 68, 69, 122, 163 symbolism 17, 18, 51, 55, 91, 140, 175, 178–80, 188–9, 192, 193 Synge, J. 179 Tangiers 11 tariffs 13, 34, 36–9, 99 Tasmania 54 taverns 10, 52–5, 57–9, 70, 73, 75, 79, 84, 94, 98, 135, 142, 149, 176 taxation 8, 9, 12, 19, 27, 32, 45, 46, 73, 82–4, 170, 172 tax farming 73 Tchelistcheff, A. 107 technological changes 21–3 technology 21–3, 26, 29, 32, 40, 41, 88 teetotalism 167, 179 television 100, 102, 104, 108 temperance Africa 85–6 Australia 110, 122, 123, 128 Britain 109–11, 113, 121, 122, 126, 165 British Empire 4, 12 Canada 70, 110, 121, 122, 128 Caribbean 23, 26, 27 Christian and secular influences 154–66 colonialism 172–3 Denmark 122, 128 ideology 161–6 movements 2, 6, 7, 9, 18, 37, 39, 66, 81, 83–6, 110, 119, 121, 141, 153–6, 159, 161, 162, 168, 170, 171, 173 narratives 175–6

Index 231

nationalism 170–2 New Zealand 172 and prohibition 178–80 and race 176–8 Russia 123 Scandinavia 109, 121, 128 socialism 166–70 Sweden 84 tales 162, 176, 177 US 117, 127, 155 temperature control 22, 24, 30, 90, 111 Tender is the Night (1934) 181, 184, 187 Tennessee 80, 165 Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854) 176 tequila 4, 5, 17, 106, 194 n.1 terroir 38 theater 150 Theory and Practice of Brewing, The (Combrune) 23 therapeutics 1, 109–17, 120, 129, 131 Thermometers 87, 88 Thin Man, The (1934) 180 third places 44, 45, 55 Thoreau, H. D. 188 tied house system 29 Tillman, B. 72 Tin Gods (1926) 176 Todd, R. B. 111, 112 tourism 78 trade unionism 167 traditional drinking 20, 43, 44, 62 traktirs 62 transcendence 187, 188 transportation 23, 29, 32, 34, 84, 85, 87, 88, 108, 110, 127 treating 18, 19, 50, 75, 123, 137–40 treatment 18, 19, 110, 111, 113, 114, 122–4, 127–30, 137, 175, 179, 187 Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus, with Observations Based upon 1000 Cases, The (Joslin) 114 trezvenniki 160 Trotter, T. 109, 121 tuberculosis 19, 114, 116, 121, 124, 125, 127 Tuborg 83, 84 Turkey 7–9, 52 Uganda Liquor Ordinance, 1917 58 UK 17, 26–8, 33, 38–41, 167 Ulysses (1922) 179, 189 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) 177 Under the Volcano (1947) 18, 184

232 Index

Union française antialcoolique 123 Union of Brewery Workmen (UBW) 89 United Committee for the Prevention of the Demoralization of the Native Races by the Liquor Trade 85, 172 United States 2–4, 6, 9–11, 14–18, 21–3, 26–30, 32–5, 37, 40, 41, 45, 50–2, 59, 62, 70–4, 78–82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 97–100, 104–10, 113, 116, 117, 119–23, 127, 128, 130, 153–7, 159–63, 165–7, 171, 173, 175, 176, 181, 184 Unknown Woman, The (Blok) 189 upper class 91, 126, 146 urbanization 1–3, 6, 7, 9, 20, 59, 62, 120, 122, 135, 136, 153, 154, 163, 183, 184 US Bottled in Bond Act 35 Vancouver 147 Van Gogh, V. 191 van Leeuwenhoek, A. 23 vats 32 Veblen, T. 50 vertical integration 3, 88 Victoria (Australia) 48, 54 Vienna 47, 113 vinaterías 60 vines 33, 34, 87, 91, 99, 107 vineyards 34, 37, 38, 96, 99, 107 Vin Mariani (Mariani) 117, 118 vintners 22, 24, 26, 95 violence 11, 43, 98, 120, 162, 163, 173, 176, 177, 187 visual culture 175, 195 n.2 viticulture 26, 32, 33, 41 vodka 46, 52, 58, 62, 73, 74, 81, 82, 94, 97, 106–7 Volstead Act 78, 80, 130 wages 17, 47, 49, 50, 75, 137, 142, 168 Wales 22, 44, 50–2, 56, 62, 75 Walker, H. 98, 105 Walkers distillery 90 war 14–19 effort 37–41 warehouses 22, 40, 80, 90, 98 War Production Board (US) 105 Wartime Trade and Pricing Commission (Canada) 82 wash 22 Washingtonians 121, 156, 167 Waugh, E. 181

We and Our Neighbors (1875) 186 Webb, F. 177 Webb-Kenyon Act 72 weddings 19, 52, 145, 157 Wells Brown, W. 173, 177 Western Australia 48, 54 Wheeler, W. B. 79, 179 whisky/whiskey 17, 22, 23, 27, 28, 39, 40, 45, 90–4, 98, 104–6, 110–13, 116, 117, 119, 138, 158 American 90 blended 28, 90, 91, 105 bourbon 27, 28, 105 Irish 91, 106, 177 rye 28, 105 Scottish 22, 23 Whitbread brewery 25 white wine 117, 119 Whitman, W. 188 Wilde, O. 189 Wilder, B. 187 Willamette Valley 29 Willard, F. 6, 165 Wilson, B. 130 wine coca 117, 118 French 11, 34, 38, 41, 99, 107, 116, 172, 173 industry 3, 4, 17, 23, 36, 77, 87, 94, 96, 99, 107 palm 35, 36, 52, 172 production 4, 21, 27, 32–5, 37, 38, 41, 48, 67, 94, 99

red 99, 117, 119 white 117, 119 Wine and Beerhouse Act, 1869 (UK) 66 winemaking 32, 87, 96 wineries 23, 32, 80, 94–6, 99, 107 Wisconsin 33, 72, 81, 104 withdrawal 181 Women’s Advisory Committee 142 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 8, 32, 119–20, 127, 129, 141, 156, 163, 165, 172, 173 Woodward, S. 121 Woolton, L. 82 working class 1, 3, 5–7, 11, 27, 46, 48, 49, 55–7, 59, 61, 62, 65, 74, 121, 123, 126, 142, 150, 158, 163, 167, 168, 177, 181–3 work parties 52 Worktown (Bolton) drinking 54 World League Against Alcoholism, The 8 World’s Fairs 5, 59 World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU) 8 wort 21, 22 Yale Center for Alcohol Studies 18, 125 Yale Plan Clinics 125, 130 yeast 21, 22, 24, 26, 87, 88, 94, 105 YMCA 129 youth culture 179 Yukon Territory 80 Zola, É. 117, 181, 182

Index 233

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