Drink in Canada: Historical Essays 9780773564336

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Drink in Canada

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Drink in Canada Historical Essays Edited by CHERYL KRASNICK WARSH

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

McGill-Queen's University Press 1993 ISBN 0-7735-1125-3 (cloth) ISBN 0-7735-1126-1 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 1993 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of grants from the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine and the Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa. Publication has also been supported by the Canada Council through its block grant program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Drink in Canada: historical essays Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1125-3 (bound) - ISBN 0-7735-1126-1 (pbk.) i. Drinking of alcoholic beverages - Canada - History. 2. Temperance - Canada - History. 3. Prohibition - Canada - History. 4. Liquor laws - Canada - History. I. Warsh, Cheryl Lynn Krasnick, 1957HV53O6.D75 1933 363.4'1'0971 093-090466-4

This book was typeset by Typo Litho composition inc. in 10/12 Palatino.

Contents

1 "John Barleycorn Must Die": An Introduction to the Social History of Alcohol / 3 CHERYL KRASNICK WARSH

2 Dry Patriotism: The Chiniquy Crusade / 27 JAN NOEL

3 Temperance in Upper Canada as Ethnic Subterfuge / 43 GLENN J LOCKWOOD

4 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart": The Drinking Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Canada / 70 CHERYL KRASNICK WARSH

5 Inebriate Institutions in North America, 1840-1920 / 92 JIM BAUMOHL

6 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave": One Family's Battle with Alcohol in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada / 115 JAMES L. STURGIS

7 Prohibition or Regulation? The Enforcement of the Canada Temperance Act in Moncton, 1881-1896 / 144 JACQUES PAUL COUTURIER

8 The East-Coast Rum-Running Economy / 166 ERNEST R. FORBES

vi

Contents

9 "Profit was just a circumstance": The Evolution of Government Liquor Control in British Columbia, 1920-1988 / 172 ROBERT A. CAMPBELL

Notes / 193 Bibliography / 249 PAMELA MCKENZIE Index / 263 Contributors / revise

Drink in Canada

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1 "John Barleycorn MustDie": An Introduction to the Social History of Alcohol CHERYL KRASNICK WARSH

There were three men came out of the West Their fortunes for to try And these three men made a solemn vow John Barleycorn must die. They've ploughed, they've sown, they've harrowed him in Threw plods upon his head And these three men made a solemn vow John Barleycorn was dead. They've let him lie for a very long time Til the rains from heaven did fall And little Sir John sprung up his head And so amazed them all. They've let him stand til Mid-Summer's Day Til he looked both pale and worn And little Sir John's grown a long, long beard And so become a man. They've hired men with the scythes so sharp To cut him off at the knee They've rolled him and tied him by the waist Serving him most barbarously.

4Drink in Canada

They've hired men with the sharp pitchforks Who've pricked him to the heart And the loader he has served him worse than that For he's bound him to the cart. They've wheeled him around and around the field Til they came unto a barn And there they made a solemn oath On poor John Barleycorn They've hired men with the crabtree sticks To cut him skin from bone And the miller he has served him worse than that For he's ground him between two stones. And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl And his brandy in the glass And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl Proved the strongest man at last. The huntsman, he can't hunt the fox Nor so loudly to blow his horn And the tinker, he can't mend kettle nor pots Without a little barleycorn. Traditional English folk-song, ca sixteenth century

The elixir of life or the demon rum? Beverage alcohol in all its forms has cemented friendships and ruptured households. Liquor has been an integral aspect of Canadian culture since European contact. Whisky was associated, with tragic consequences, with the fur trade, and the prohibition of liquor sales to First Nations peoples survived into the twentieth century as a vestige of that trade and of the bureaucratic paternalism that surrounds the sale of alcohol.1 So important was the toddy for the sailors, the woodcutters, and the fishermen that it could be said that much of Canada was built on Jamaican rum and local whisky. Liquor facilitated the raising of barns, the harvesting of crops, and certainly the election of governments.2 Contemporary culture has been bombarded with the conflicting images of convivial drink and destructive alcoholism. Organized spectator sports are highly dependent upon the breweries; ironically, it was recreational alternatives that helped to divert men and

5 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

boys from the saloons. The label "Canadian" on whisky is proof that the product is unadulterated - a tradition from the continental rumrunning days of the 19205 and 19305. Juxtaposed to these images are the graphic warnings against the drunk driver, who, by consuming an excess of legally purchased, highly taxed beverages, endangers the lives of others.3 The contradictory messages have been amalgamated recently in a billboard campaign by the Brewers' Council of Canada. Beneath the domestic image of a mother and child appears the caption "Please Drink Responsibly." Be responsible, but please drink. The emotions raised by drunken driving and domestic violence caused by drunkenness are not new responses, nor are they unfamiliar to scholars. The remarkable and divisive anti-liquor lobby mobilized by female non-voters in the late nineteenth century has long interested political and women's historians, who agree that the temperance crusades served as the catalyst for the women's movement.4 Apart from its elevation of domestic values over those of the male subculture, the anti-liquor campaign was an exhilarating and liberating experience for its soldiers. As one woman enthused, "The Crusade was a daily dissipation from which it seemed impossible to tear myself. In the intervals at home I felt, as I can fancy the drinker does at the breaking down of a long spree."5 As the first great public action movement of the young nation, the Canadian temperance crusade has provoked a significant body of social history.6 Yet these works have failed to examine adequately the social, psychological, and economic functions of drinking. Rather than concentrate upon the failure of prohibition, historians must examine the persistent success of beverage alcohol. Why, indeed, did John Barleycorn "prove the strongest man at last?" The answer to this puzzle may be found in the social sciences. The anthropological perspective has been valuable in the field of alcohol studies. As Heath asserts, "social and cultural factors must be taken into account, together with physiological and psychological factors, when one attempts to understand the interaction of alcohol and human behaviour."7 One interesting aspect of the anthropological perspective relative to Canada is the persistence of interest in the subject-matter itself. According to the Scandinavian researcher Ma'kela, "Alcohol research as a behavioural science is particularly active in ambivalent societies" - that is, societies where drinking is prevalent yet proscriptions against drunkenness are severe, as in Finland, the United States, and Canada.8 The concept of ambivalence, as defined by the social anthropologists, was created to describe conflicting attitudes towards alcohol consumption, which

6 Drink in Canada

were the legacy of the anti-liquor movement.9 As Harry G. Levine has concluded, the lasting achievement of temperance ideology was to ensure that the joyous image of alcohol would always exist under the shadow of the demon rum after the 18303. Alcohol was both medicine and poison, creative and destructive.10 A second key concept from social anthropology, as identified by Craig McAndrew and Robert Edgerton, describes the function of drinking as a facilitator to a conventionalized period of "cultural remission" or "time out."11 The American sociologist Joseph Gusfield concludes that "time out" was a product of the industrial economy, with its characterization of life as divided between leisure or "notwork" and work or "not-leisure."12 In North American culture, alcohol acts as a symbol of leisure ("It's time for a drink") as well as a disinhibiter and dissolver of "hierarchy and structure." The antithesis of the evening cocktail would be the morning coffee, a ritual signifying the commencement of the workday. It is no coincidence that in the eighteenth century, coffee and tea drinking first met with popularity in the commercial districts of London and Paris, where caffeine consumption would be accompanied by discussions concerning the latest political and shipping news.13 The negative aspects of drinking as a state of cultural remission were behaviours targeted by the temperance crusaders. As Levine notes, "The saloon was, above all else, the anti-home ... It was a place whose point was 'time-out' from responsibility ... Thus if a respectable man was ever to go to a prostitute, beat his wife, get in a fight, or do anything he would not ordinarily do, he would very likely drink before doing it - or would do it when drunk. To get drunk was to abandon both respectability and self-control."14 The drinking establishment has been a feature of Western society for centuries. The multifaceted functions of the alehouse, inn, tavern, or saloon rendered it adaptable to social, economic, and religious transformations. In his study of the English alehouse, for instance, Alan J. Epstein describes the transition of London from a Catholic feudal town to a Protestant capitalist metropolis and notes the concomitant growth of the alehouse as a social institution replacing the church and family in importance in an era of increased mobility. While Epstein's comparison is somewhat overdrawn, the London alehouse did become a particularly "convenient, inexpensive form of refreshment, recreation, association and identification" for the new class of bachelor lodgers in the city.15 The British tradition of public houses was closely tied to the guild system. Journeymen and apprentices would be charged "usage money" or fines, which would be cleared at the pubs. Wages were customarily paid in pubs in large pound notes, with saloon-keepers

7 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

acting as both cashiers and outlets for the workers' wages.l6 Similar functions were performed in the saloon hotels of the Canadian prairies during the late nineteenth century.17 A more primitive form of economic exchange existed in Australia during the convict labour period (1780-18403), when alcohol functioned as currency.18 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries American civic leaders attempted to purge the drinking habits imported from the English villages and to establish temperance as a popular cultural value, but they were never successful. David W. Conroy concludes that "public houses continued to serve primary social functions [such as the] facilitation of the flow of news and information through and between communities. Moreover taverns [became] the settings in which changes in the colony's social and political order were expressed and realized."19 These functions were transported to the Canadian colonies as well. Indeed, as Sandra Barry has noted, in Nova Scotia alcohol created the whole social setting. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tavern-keepers served on local grand juries and judges owned inns. Because settlement was sparse, taverns were centres of information and municipal affairs - and drunkenness. As early as 1715 the authorities of lie Royale (Cape Breton) were complaining of excessive drinking.20 The importance of the saloon was not merely nor primarily instrumental. The "anti-home" was also the "anti-shop," and it served to transmit and perpetuate traditional male values that pre-dated capitalism. In eighteenth-century Paris the tavern supplemented the domestic living space for men and enhanced male solidarities. "The values inherent in sociability entail specific attitudes toward consumption, generosity, honor, and leisure," Thomas Brennan argues: These attitudes bear more than a passing resemblance to the culture of reciprocity encountered in "primitive" societies. Sociability means not only that men sought each others' companionship, but that their conviviality imposed certain obligations of consumption and expenditure, obligations that brought them into conflict with other imperatives in their society. Such consumption not only acted to fortify the fellowship of drinking groups and, ultimately, of social networks, but also competed with the requirements of the domestic economy and with an emerging definition of "rational" behavior.21

In this light we see that the tradition of treating, or the buying of rounds, a ritual much decried by temperance advocates, promoted social solidarity and reduced the importance of money as the

8 Drink in Canada

measure of all things, since treating was the duty of all of one's company, regardless of group size or income.22 Middle-class opponents of this anti-capitalist activity, such as the merchants who blamed the great depression of 1870 upon workers who drank rather than purchased their goods, "mistook moral failings for Saint Monday, the traditional but then declining working class custom of rejecting surplus money earned under regimented capitalism for subsistence incomes with leisure time."23 In terms of both male subculture and community functions, the saloon was long-lived in North America, especially for a mobile and immigrant population. Thomas J. Noel has noted that, in Denver, "long after the frontier period passed, heavy drinking remained an expression of hospitality and of manliness. The obsession with virility, potency, body building and sports that characterized turnof-the-century America permeated saloons."24 The saloons decried by the prohibitionists during the progressive period tended to be patronized by first-generation immigrants, whose unfamiliarity with the language and customs of their new homes led them to rely on ethnic drinking places, which still functioned as clearing-houses for information concerning employment, housing, and general knowledge about the alien American environment.25 Although the saloon was a male establishment, women played an important role in the liquor business so long as society remained predominantly rural. As Peter Clark relates, the alewife, or female family brewer, was a customary figure of English rural life from at least the fourteenth century. Selling ale was not, however, a recognized occupation but fulfilled needs during certain seasons or certain points in the life of the family by providing supplementary income. After the Black Death, a general increase in wages diminished the need for many families to sell ale. Town water became increasingly polluted as well, and the brewing of ale was concentrated in large business concerns. The running of alehouses was still seen as a welfare measure for widows and the elderly,26 as it was in postgold-rush Denver27 and early nineteenth-century New Brunswick. According to Peter McGahan, the major function of the County Court of Sessions of the Peace in Saint John of the 18205 and 18305 was the issuance of tavern and retail licences, and widows were common petitioners.28 The same social forces that removed respectable women from public drinking establishments were also the pre-conditions for the temperance movement. Peter Clark concludes that puritan influences rendered the presence of women in taverns less acceptable by the seventeenth century, and they rarely drank in such compa-

9 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

ny except during celebrations or journeys.29 By the late Victorian period in Britain, public insobriety was even less visible, especially among the respectable.30 David Gutzke asserts that women of the upper, middle, and skilled working classes, if they drank, would do so only at home or in ladies-only bars in London. Religious influences and the generalized negative image was an effective deterrent of public drinking. But in the poorest neighbourhoods women continued to drink in public and to send their children for beer in jugs ("rushing the growler"). Roy M. MacLeod argues that it was the misery of the slums in Britain, beginning in the 18305, that increased consumption of alcohol, particularly of gin, among women and young boys.31 The split in consumption patterns along class lines further supported the prohibitionists' association of drinking with poverty and female drinking with indecency, as I discuss in a later essay in this volume, "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart." The "unwomanliness" of drinking, the feared dangers to offspring and to the "race" that drinking represented, rendered it difficult if not impossible for female alcoholics to admit to their disease and seek help. The association of drinking with manliness has resonance in our own culture, and the problems of secret substance abuse among women persist as well. In Brian Harrison's otherwise perceptive study on British temperance, he embraces the stereotype of the disreputable and impoverished female drinker: The 19th-century drinking place, like the 20th-century expense account, encouraged men to enjoy better living standards than their wives. To make matters worse, drunken husbands were often stung by the wife's silent or open reproach into the wife-beating for which Englishmen were notorious abroad. Victorian sentimentality made the most of such situations, but music-hall songs emphasizing fear of the "missus" suggest that some males fled from the home only because the female was dominant there; indeed domineering wives sometimes produced drunken husbands ... In other cases the home suffered from the wife's laziness or ignorance. By offering her outside employment, industrialization deprived her of time and energy for housework, and even caused a reversal of roles in which wives became wage-earners and husbands domestic drudges. If women were excluded from the public-house they had their own recreation in "stair-head drinking clubs," chapel life and local gossip.32

Harrison does, however, emphasize the superior choices enjoyed by husbands. By the 18205 the drinking place "still possessed many comforts absent from the poor man's home. Light, heat, cooking

io Drink in Canada

facilities, furniture, newspapers and sociability were then obtained by the poor [man] at the drinking place/'33 A third significant contribution of anthropology to the social history of alcohol, and to the "big question ... why do people drink to get drunk?"34 is the concept of anxiety reduction, first postulated in 1945 by Donald Horton in his classic study "Alcohol Use in Primitive Societies."35 Horton argues that drinking encourages social peace in pre-literate cultures through alcohol's sedative qualities and its relief of anxiety and aggression, including sexual aggression. In The Alcoholic Republic W.J. Rorabaugh has adapted Horton's model to Jacksonian America, a period of peak consumption, stating that drinking is a function of a culture's social organization. When social systems fail to meet an individual's needs, a high intake of alcohol and drinking to excess may occur.36 The same processes of social change that culminated in support for temperance have been cited as responsible for increased levels of drinking. As Rorabaugh states: a high level of drunkenness is likely in cultures that are anxiety-ridden, structurally disintegrating, or incompetent in providing individuals with a sense of effectiveness. Such societies are most likely to be found under conditions of stress, when the social order has been wrenched either by contact with alien cultures or by internal dislocations caused by changes in ideology, institutions, structure or economy. A high level of consumption of alcohol, however, need not be culturally abnormal, for drinking can be the means by which a society attempts to fulfill certain personal needs.37

In the context of early nineteenth-century North America, the rise in population and diminishing access to cheap local land, increased urbanization, the boom-bust economy, and poor outdoor working conditions for occupations like teamsters, lumberjacks, and canalworkers led to increased alcohol consumption as a way of coping with physical and psychological stresses.38 Rorabaugh argues that the group binges of the 18205 became the solo binges of the 18305, as the growth of individualism affected drinking habits as well as other aspects of behaviour. Furthermore, the preference for distilled liquors over beers and wines may well indicate the extent of the anxiety, hence the reliance on the strongest, most anxiety-reducing forms of alcoholic beverage.39 James Sturgis explores the psychological costs of individualism in the context of late Victorian Canada through the use of collective biography in his essay in this volume, "The spectre of a drunkard's grave." Three of the sons of James Rennie, a teetotalling Calvinist minister in northern Ontario, be-

ii "John Barleycorn Must Die"

came alcoholics after they were forced to emigrate to the United States in search of work. They joined the thousands of rootless, mobile young men and women who sought a stable, middle-class lifestyle.40 Rootlessness could degenerate into the type of picaresque existence that Will and Jack Rennie found themselves caught up in, full of swindlers, thieves, snake-oil salesmen, and cutthroats, or, as Sturgis terms it, a "mobile skid row." The accuracy of the psycho-social explanations of the persistence of drinking, and their utility for social historians, may be determined through the assumption of a cross-cultural perspective. Why, for instance, did the French maintain such a different attitude towards drink from that of the British or North Americans? In her recent study of the temperance movement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, Patricia Prestwich asserts that "social attitudes have long favored the consumption of alcohol, particularly wine, and these prejudices, readily exploited by economic interests, have been an important factor in maintaining France's high level of alcohol consumption."41 The relative insignificance of the movement in France can be understood only within the broader contexts of the economic and political power of the wine industry,42 the popularity of wine as a medicine among members of the medical profession,43 and the role of drink in everyday life - that is, the cafe culture.44 The discourse of drinking also reveals cultural attitudes towards consumption. As Sadoun, Lolli, and Silverman note in Drinking in French Culture, the French have many synonyms for inebriation, unlike Jews and Italians, "who do not accept intoxication as a comical condition."45 Beyond the psychological and cultural explanations for heavy drinking, there are also material considerations. Economies based upon resource extraction, for instance, have tended towards high levels of alcohol consumption. In early Australia, areas with the highest levels of consumption tended to be on the frontier, where the work was hot, there were few women, and the pub was the focal point of the community.46 Provinces like New Brunswick47 and Nova Scotia,48 with their cold climates, seaports, resource industries, and work rations of alcohol had populations with a love of spirits, particularly rum. Concerns over widespread drunkenness and its costs in these resource-based communities resulted in the early organization of temperance societies. The first in North America, in fact, was established in Nova Scotia in 1827. In Upper Canada lumbermen enjoyed the worst reputation for excessive drinking and violence. Saloons existed every few miles along the Ottawa River, and drunken men terrorized farms along the way.4^

12 Drink in Canada

Subsistence agriculture also contributed to peak levels of consumption. Rorabaugh notes that, in the United States, per capita consumption of alcohol in the 18305 was four gallons, the highest recorded. He concludes that countries that partake most of distilled liquors are those that are agriculturally based, sparsely populated, Protestant, and have much grain available for distillation. In a rural nation, with poor transportation and few local markets, grain farmers find the distillation of surplus cereals to be an efficient and profitable choice.50 In the Canadian context, Protestantism is the least valid of his requirements, as Jan Noel recounts in her article in this volume, "Dry Patriotism: The Chiniquy Crusade," describing alcohol consumption and temperance agitation in Canada East (Quebec) in the 18405. Canada West's (Ontario) statistics are no less striking.51 In Toronto of 1851, for instance, there were more taverns than streets, and the per capita consumption rate of three gallons of whisky per year was five times greater than that of 1951. James Clemens has noted that on a journey from Toronto to Barrie in the 18405, a traveller would pass sixty-six licensed taverns, plus many unlicensed, or more than one per mile. The Upper Canada census of 1851 recorded 1,990 taverns, or i to every 478 people.52 By 1893 the Pacific province of British Columbia, with its resource-based economy, led the nation in per capita consumption.53 Drinking habits and responses to temperance have been mediated by class interests. Corporate powers, such as those of the French wine regions54 and British brewing dynasties,55 have added political weight to the anti-prohibitionist camps. The debate over compensation of brewers and distillers for lost revenues polarized Tory and Liberal, upper and middle classes, and Anglican and nonconformist in Great Britain by the 18705.56 Elite views on drinking, however, were not entirely financially motivated. That temperance attitudes had not percolated up to the higher echelons of British society is evident in the comment of Lord Houghton that "a love for strong drink is characteristic of the noble and more energetic populations of the world and accompanies public and private enterprise, constancy of purpose, liberty of thought and aptitude for War." In short, his comments were a defence of the male subculture, and of an empire based on drink.57 The association of drunkenness with social unrest did produce elite support for controls on drinking, especially in unstable social settings such as nineteenth-century Ireland and the eighteenthcentury United States. After 1780, the enormous increase in whisky consumption in Ireland aroused alarm among the gentry, who were curbing their own predilection for massive amounts of wine. The

13 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

Irish anti-spirits movement, beginning in 1829, was elitist and successful among Protestants, especially in Ulster.58 The disorderliness associted with the American colonial taverns similarly raised the wrath and anxieties of the ruling elites against them.59 The views of organized labour towards drinking have been complex. American working-class organizations in the nineteenth century were not opposed to temperance on principle. Organizations like the National Labor Union, which was a reformist rather than class-conscious society, advocated sobriety in the i86os and 18705 as a means to enhance reforms (e.g., conservation of wages for cooperatives and labour journals) and to support claims for popular government. Labour organizations argued that it was the degradation of the worker that promoted insobriety, not vice versa.6o During the 19205 American prohibition lost whatever support it initially had from organized labour when the laws took beer away from the workingmen while allowing the affluent to maintain their liquor cellars.61 In Canada urban artisans and mechanics constituted the rank and file of temperance in the mid-nineteenth century. In his study of the people of Saint John, New Brunswick, T.W. Acheson stresses that temperance support was not based among the middle class, as it would be in the country's urban centres.62 Even after the Great War, labour leaders spoke favourably of temperance practices, "attributing labour's new-found militancy to the success of prohibition." According to the socialist R.P. Pettipiece, "Drink will break a strike sooner than anything else except hunger ... The wage slave that tries to drown the misery of daily toil and poverty in 'booze' is hopeless. He can be neither organized or educated and it will require a sober, organized and educated working class to emancipate itself from wage slavery."63 Yet such speeches reflect the persistence of higher levels of alcohol consumption among the working class. Although general consumption levels declined steadily through the turn of the century, urban labourers consumed relatively more beer. As Graeme Decarie concludes, "by the 18905, then, if some Ontarians were drinking much less, others, probably the urban working class, were drinking much more."64 Despite pockets of support among the elite and working classes, temperance ideology has invariably been associated with the emerging middle classes and evangelical religion. Whether initiated by the Revolutionary physician Benjamin Rush or the Federalist evangelical minister Lyman Beecher, concern over intemperance was related to images of disorder. Originally a Calvinist, Beecher (1775-1863) believed that individuals could modify their behaviour and save

14 Drink in Canada

themselves, but only freedom from the sin of intemperance would leave them receptive to the gospel. His Six Sermons on Intemperance galvanized temperance agitation in Nova Scotia and southern New Brunswick, an area already razed by the New Light Baptist crusades of Henry Alline and his followers.65 According to A.M. Winkler, Beecher's Six Sermons were based as much upon the author's anxieties over the extension of democracy in Jeffersonian America as over the problems associated with drunkenness. "Like other American clergymen of his era, he worked for moral reform to help preserve the social order he knew."66 This interpretation of temperance was first advanced by Joseph Gusfield in his classic study Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Gusfield attributes the movements to control the drinking habits of others to "status anxiety" among members of the middle classes who felt threatened by changes in the social structure wrought by the industrial economy.67 With the growth of urbanization and industrial work rhythms and the integration of local economies into regional and national markets, it became increasingly vital for those most affected by these changes to develop some control over their lives during a time when all appeared to be in turmoil. As Jed Dannenbaum has concluded, the Panic of 1837 and the subsequent economic depression stimulated this need. The lasting influence of the series of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening defined the channels this control would take.68 The Gusfield model has found great resonance in the Canadian literature. Sandra Barry argues that, although temperance support in Nova Scotia was rural rather than bourgeois, it was also based on material advancement in a region of uncertain economic stability. A resolution of a Queen's County temperance society of the 18305 maintained "that a few years ago the sale and consumption of spiritous liquors ... were highly injurious and detrimental to our prosperity ... but owing to the introduction of Dr Beecher's Sermons among us, and other valuable publications on the evils of Intemperance and the use of ardent spirits, we became determined to unite our endeavours."69 Both the Lower Canadian habitants and the loyalist Americans of Upper Canada, examined in this collection by Jan Noel and Glenn J Lockwood respectively, attempted to cope with rapid economic and demographic changes through the adoption of temperance in the 18305 and 18405. The communities surrounding Quebec, Trois Rivieres, and the Ottawa Valley were besieged by waves of aggressive, ambitious, and prosperous Irish, English, and Scottish immigrants, who purchased and improved unprofitable

15 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

farms and neglected fields. The speed with which these new settlers established dominance in a region forced the host communities to look inward and to adopt the temperance lifestyle as a solution to their economic woes. The temperance movements of the early Victorian era were collective acts of individualism; each drinker who renounced the bottle was affirming the triumph of his or her will and the intent to meet the social and economic challenges that lay ahead. Gusfield's model is also valid for the second wave of temperance reform after 1870, which was a response to the problems attendant upon urbanization and the fluctuations of an industrial economy. The 18705 and 18905, decades in which the increased agitation of the temperance lobbies led in Canada to the federal enactment of localoption legislation (the Scott Act) in 1874 and the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic in 1891, were periods of economic depression.70 The growing numbers of unemployed, homeless "tramps" served to remind the middle classes of the potential dangers to their health, persons, and property that the indigent represented. Norman Clark has discussed these developments in the context of progressive America: "Significant liquor reform followed significant social change ... Drunkenness, prostitution, miscenegation, venereal disease, poverty, bossism - these were the darkest threats to the values through which the American middle class had established its identity ... Those individuals who were most vocal and active in their temperance convictions in the 18905 and early 19005 would most likely have been those on the margins of middle-class identification to whom status had a high urgency."71 These anxieties and motivations were apparent in Canada as well, especially in Ontario, the heartland of industrial growth, immigration, and evangelical Protestantism. The Methodist connection was potent in provincial politics; Premiers Hearst, Drury, and Ferguson and opposition leaders Rowell and Dewart were all members of this prohibitionist faith, and Rowell's sister was president of the Dominion Woman's Christian Temperance Union (wcxu). 72 Decarie has argued that the Lord's Day Alliance of Toronto attempted to preserve the "proper" (that is, their own) lifestyle against urban and industrial influences.73 The consequence was the unique blandness of blue Toronto. Under the government of William Hearst, "on an Ontario Sunday in 1919 ... it was forbidden to buy ice cream, newspapers, or a cigar; to play baseball, tennis, or golf; to fish or take a steamboat excursion. The Lord's Day Alliance carefully guarded against the breaking of the Sabbath. Horse-racing suffered from restrictions; 'moving pictures' were heavily censored or prohibited; the use of tobacco was increasingly attacked."74

16 Drink in Canada

Far from being an attack on all industrial influences, the extreme propriety of this Protestant nouveau elite was a beacon of materialism, as J.A. Stevenson remarked in 1919: "Too often in Canada the chief apostles of complete prohibition are merely comfortable and prosperous citizens who have made their money and enjoy the esteem & respect of their trade, church, and neighbourhood. Many of them consider prominence in the temperance movement as a kind of free advertisement by which they can herald to the public at large their splendid piety and financial stability."75 The narrow appeal of this form of temperance inevitably sowed the seeds of its own destruction. As Smart and Ogborne have noted, between 1871 and 1931 Anglican adherents in Canada trebled and Roman Catholics increased fourfold, while Baptists did not double their membership and Methodists barely did so.76 The heyday of the saloon had passed by the second half of the nineteenth century, as communities grew more stable and both counter-attractions and services became available. By the 18705 new foods, recreation and leisure activities, coffee shops, sports, and libraries were common. The transportation revolution, especially that railways, eliminated arduous coach travel, which dictated frequent stopovers at inns.77 Various temperance activities also had long-term effects upon drinking habits. The Good Templar lodges, "which were really non-alcoholic saloons ... attempted a masculine appeal through an emphasis on companionship, ritual, 'wholesome' entertainment, and 'clean manhood/ on pool tables, reading rooms, and good talk."78 In Canada the early temperance societies were social and offered parties, meetings, band concerts, and parades. Smart and Ogborne conclude that the major benefit of these organizations was the reduction of drinking at bees and dances.79 As small communities matured, the establishment of churches, banks, hospitals, theatres, and welfare and employment agencies correspondingly diminished the service functions of the taverns.80 The consequence of this growth in alternatives was that by the 19205, respectable men were effectively separated from the saloon; the only function left for this venerable institution was its association with "prostitution, gambling, police corruption and crime."81 One characteristic of industrial growth that served to galvanize prohibitionist sentiment was rapid immigration. Nancy Sheehan has found a positive relation between the settlement of the prairie provinces and the increase in prohibitionist sentiment. The rise of a non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant population, for whom abstention was not a cultural norm, and the maturation of urban communities

17

"John BarleycornMustDie"

produced such favourable conditions. By the 19105 the WCTU was an active reform movement in the west.82 At the same time, the xenophobic aspects of the WCTU anti-liquor campaigns also eliminated the possibility of support from immigrants.83 Erhard Pinno argues that the experience in Saskatchewan, a rural province, demonstrates that Gusfield's status anxiety need not have been urban-based; there was, however, a significant evangelical population, and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe in great numbers. The xenophobia of western temperance reached its apex by 1925, when the Ku Klux Klan appeared in Saskatchewan.84 Norman Clark, by combining Gusfield's model with the Turner thesis, has contributed an explanation for temperance activities in the state of Washington that is appropriate to much of the Canadian experience: The Northern Pacific and the Great Northern railroads made the Northwest into a real safety valve, a valve which was wide-open because the move was cheap and easy. Thus the region attracted hundreds of thousands of men and women who wanted social as well as economic opportunity. Their geographic mobility was also social mobility, for the migrants were moving into the middle class. It was no coincidence that during these years of great social change the prohibition movement reached its greatest intensity.85

Herein lies the next issue in the Canadian historiography; what were the geographical dimensions of temperance support or nonsupport? According to Sandra Barry, temperance support required a base level of community development. In Nova Scotia temperance societies could only materialize after 1828 because "the primitive state of early settlement, beleagured by isolation, a subsistancebarter economy and a lack of transportation facilities, dictated an indifference to the bourgeois values which temperance enshrined ... Temperance was rooted in the oldest most populated areas of white society because it was only there that, as a companion to modernization and business efficiency, the middle-class basis of temperance had any meaning."86 Laurie Barren has found the same pattern in Upper Canada/ Canada West between 1828 and 1850; temperance agitation was strongest where rapid growth, urbanization, and the transformation to market agriculture was most evident, and weakest where subsistence agriculture was still important.87 Similar conditions were apparent in the west. Sheehan's study of the WCTU in the prairie provinces is an exemplary outline of the factors that alternately

i8 Drink in Canada

hindered and promoted temperance agitation. Before 1900 the national WCTU attempted to expand its influence into the new region but was unsuccessful due to the primitive nature of the agrarian communities not yet in possession of schools and churches, a widely scattered, sparse population where open drinking and widespread drunkenness was not apparent, and an agrarian outlook that saw intemperance as a personal rather than a social failing. By the 18905 the Liquor Licence Ordinance, allowing sales in hotels, replaced the Territorial Prohibition Act of the 18705, and intemperance became more obvious.88 Of contrasting developments in nineteenth-century Great Britain David Gutzke concludes: "paradoxically, areas least needing prohibition - rural agricultural parishes with low drunkenness levels would have been most likely to enact it."89 Gutzke's paradox may be quite simple to explain. The rural parishes of nineteenth-century Britain, similar to the Ontario parishes by the 18405, were characterized by market rather than subsistence agriculture, and land was dear. The "safety-valve" benefits of farming in southern Ontario were quickly disappearing, and control of personal behaviour became necessary to compensate for the lack of control over economic forces. The bedrock of support for prohibition in southern Ontario was long-lived. In his analysis of the 1894 plebiscite, Decarie observes that the prohibition vote was concentrated in this region, which was heavily populated and close to, but not in, urban areas.90 Reginald Hose's contemporary summary of the results of the 1926 federal referendum on local option (that is, permitting liquor licences by counties) demonstrated the following split in rural/urban opinion regarding the Canada Temperance Act: Cities with licence Towns with licence Rural with licence Total with licence

(91.4%) (57.6%) (14.9%) (49.2%)

without licence without licence without licence without licence

(8.6%) (42.4%) (85.1%) (50.8%)91

Writing in 1928, Hose concluded that "the urbanization of people, and the importance of the industrial life, which contribute disproportionately to the attractions of city life ... would suggest that the belief in local option is losing weight as a means of arresting excessive drinking, as it is not by fresh legislation but by co-operative and tolerant acceptance of existing legislation that moderation can be made successful."92 Demographic changes - that is, the growth of an urbanized, ethnically diverse population - rendered prohibition increasingly obsolete.

19 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

In The Regenerators, Ramsay Cook maintains that nineteenthcentury Methodism and Presbyterianism, which emphasized social action, evolved into the secularized social-welfare movement.93 The secularization of religious values was nowhere more apparent than in the temperance societies. From the teetotallers of Britain in the 18303 - middle-class dissenters, working-class labourers, and Liberal nonconformists seeking social mobility94 - to the Methodists of Ontario in the 18905 who attempted to restructure, or at least to define the restructuring of the new economic order, the religious virtue of temperance became the religion of temperance. According to Lilian Shiman, the temperance society was one avenue for the working class to take in their attempts to structure and control their lives. It was in the 18308 and 18405 that English temperance shifted from its origins as a middle-class and religious movement into the teetotalling movement of the working class.95 Harrison adds that the temperance movement was, in fact, one of several transitional organizations channelling religious energies into party politics ... Throughout the i9th century, the movement tried to substitute a united moral reform crusade for the traditional concentration on liturgical, doctrinal and organization questions. In the 18305 the teetotal lecturers, a band of secular friars, secularized the conversion-experience. And in the early Victorian period the teetotalers and prohibitionists directed attention away from an otherwordly paradise towards an earthly Utopia, which would be realized after moral suasion or prohibition had teetotalized the world.96

The adoption of temperate habits did not overcome class prejudices; indeed, they were often hardened. Once the British middle classes were no longer in control of the movement, Shiman concludes, they opposed the teetotallers as "inferiors" attempting to rise above their stations by adopting the work and social habits of their superiors.97 These same class prejudices were even more apparent in North America, as church and reform leaders no longer controlled the movement they had initiated. Among the earliest of the temperance societies was the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance (MSSI), established in 1813, which generated one of the earliest of the controversies: the adoption of the pledge. As Robert L. Hampel recounts, the act of pledging was seen by traditionalists in the evangelical church as somewhat blasphemous and tainted with Masonism; more importantly, it replaced self-reliance, an essential element of evangelical salvation, with artificial restraints.98 The temperance pledge, which in effect replaced a person's vow to God with a vow to another person, was

2O Drink in Canada

no less controversial in England in the 18305. Its opponents' fears appear justified by the testimony of converts to temperance, who perceived their pledges as acts of rebirth." Yet religious objections could not be separated from class objections. The MS si did not welcome drunkards, whose pledges were considered unreliable. The latter found their home during the 18405 in the Washingtonian movement: "At the height of Washingtonianism, moral suasion seemed altruistic, humanitarian, and effective. The denunciatory spleen sometimes found in the moral suasion of the 18305 left most Washingtonians cold."100 The Washingtonians were the first of the series of self-help groups for alcoholics (the most successful being, of course, Alcoholics Anonymous), and preached that "every man must find a man." The value of comradeship was most effective in supplanting the saloon for those who found the new age of individualism too alienating to be worth maintaining sobriety. Although the temperance societies and the Washingtonians appeared to share the same goals, the divisions in the temperance organizations reflected the divisions in the larger society with respect to class and propriety. "Sunday meetings, boastful comparisons to the clergy, and uncouth songs alienated many religious members ... who initially endorsed the Washingtonians."101 Following the brief (1840-43) popularity of the Washingtonian movement in Canada, the reclamation of alcoholics was neglected by the temperance movement until the early 18705, with the advent of Gospel Temperance. Founded by Francis Murphy, an uneducated Irish-American who had experienced religious conversion in jail, the Gospel Temperance crusade in Canada was spearheaded by another reformed drunkard, D.I.K. Rine. Rine's fire-and-brimstone sermons initially met with great enthusiasm in communities in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. A controversial charge of indecent assault brought his crusade in Canada to an end, however, an outcome that was predictable, AJ. Birrell concludes, given that the "stern, moral, Christian" individuals who composed the temperance elite were never comfortable with his support.102 As in the United States, the middle-class reformers missed an opportunity to expand their support beyond members of their own class, thereby dooming the long-term success of the temperance effort. Clemens has asserted that "the middle class zealot [of Ontario] seemed to want to keep [the reformed drunkard] on show, to put him out so that the reformer's own lofty position could be contemplated with satisfaction in contrast to the [former's] still debased condition."103 Such a characterization would appear to describe Ben

21 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

Spence, secretary of the Dominion Alliance for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic, considered "the most unyielding, demanding and self-righteous of prohibitionists, [who] seemed to feel that he was easily the most outstanding temperance man in the province."104 Clemens' conclusion diminishes the importance of agency, however. Reformed drunkards willingly took to the lecture circuits throughout North America and the United Kingdom. The craving for attention and power was a characteristic of the alcoholic personality identified by Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.105 A fascinating comparison might well be made between the "alcoholic" and the "prohibitionist" personality, since Spence appears to have had much in common with the ex-drunkard on the lecture circuit. Temperance societies, however, were of lasting influence, particularly in Canadian politics. The Sons of Temperance, for example, instituted in 1842 as an offshoot of the Washingtonian movement, moved into Canada by the end of the decade and pioneered efforts for legislated prohibition in both nations. The first Canadian lodges were opened in St Stephen, New Brunswick, and Samuel Leonard Tilley's success in provincial and federal politics was aided by his rise through the ranks of the temperance society; the premier and lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick and father of Confederation was first Grand Worthy Patriarch of the Sons of Temperance. Tilley's fellow Maritime father of Confederation and future prime minister Sir Charles Tupper was the son of the founder of one of Nova Scotia's (and Canada's) first temperance societies.106 To add a personal light to the benefits of taking the pledge, consider the letter of James Brown, member of the New Brunswick Cabinet with Tilley, to his son James in 1858: My Dear James, Although I have had very little communication with you for sometime past, on the disagreeable and heartrending subject of intemperance, I have never ceased to feel the greatest interest and anxiety with regard to you ... Last night ...I [was informed] that you were wrong again ... This struck me to the heart - drove all public matters at once out of my mind, and made me not only sorry, but sick also! ... And now my dear James, what can I say to you that I have not said before? Or what can I do, in addition to what I have done already? ...I begged of you, many years ago, to join the Sons of Temperance, an association which although it cannot work miracles, has saved many ... It is a great advantage to the family that so many of them belong to the order, and an inexpressible grief, to me that you should be the

22 Drink in Canada exception ... Indeed, I know, it is in vain to remonstrate with you now! If ... the cases of violent death, and living misery which happen all around have no effect on you ... Yours in affliction, James Brown107

Similar to that of the working classes, the responses of nonProtestants to the temperance campaigns were complex. As Jan Noel relates in "Dry Patriotism," there was early Catholic support for a reform in drinking habits, initiated by the campaign of the Irish preacher Father Mathew. In her study of drinking habits in Ireland, Elizabeth Malcolm maintains that transatlantic influences were even earlier: "It was news of the successes of the American Temperance Society, founded in 1826 in Boston, that acted as a major spur to Irish temperance advocates, and the American experience was to remain an important model."108 Yet the enthusiastic adoption of coercion as a means to achieve prohibition by the evangelical Protestant churches, and the use of intemperate, anti-Catholic, and xenophobic language by prohibitionists frustrated by the persistent failure of their agenda, soon dissipated Catholic support for the temperance crusade. Editorials in the Catholic press documented the community's fears and objections: "Prohibition violates a fundamental right of an individual," stated St Peter's Messenger. "It shatters national unity, it fosters discord, foments emnities, gives rise to an endless series of quarrels and suspicions ... It is the wholesale manufacture of liars and sneaks and hypocrites." Furthermore, "the leaders of the prohibition league are ... filled with a virulent hatred for the Roman Catholic church and all that belongs to it."109 In terms of popular attitudes, districts of Catholic support for prohibition were conspicuous by their absence. The city of New Orleans, for instance, with its large French, Creole, Spanish, and Catholic populations and its dependence on tourism (with accompanying vices such as gambling and prostitution) for prosperity was notable for virtually ignoring the existence of national prohibition.110 Camillien Houde's Montreal was its Canadian counterpart. Even in the Maritime provinces, the birthplace of Canadian temperance, prohibition was not successful, as the articles in this collection by Jacques Paul Couturier and Ernest R. Forbes relate. In New Brunswick temperance strength was limited to the areas outside of the north shore and of the city of Saint John, where Acadian and Irish opposition to prohibitory measures was significant.111 As Couturier's study makes evident, the use of the legal system as an instrument to enforce morality could not be successful without the

23 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

widespread support of the populace. Elsewhere, Albert J. Hiebert has shown that the predominance of Anglicans and Roman Catholics in British Columbia similarly impeded widespread support for prohibition in the Pacific province.112 Prohibitionist rhetoric also alienated Canada's Jewish minority, despite the fact that cultural proscriptions against drunkenness had resulted in the ethnic group's maintenance of one of the lowest rates of alcoholism.113 The involvement of Jews - notably the Bronfman brothers - in the liquor trade exacerbated the anti-Semitic tendencies of some of the most fervent evangelical prohibitionists as well as political opportunists.114 In one of the more ignoble acts of the 1919 Ontario provincial election, Liberal leader Dewart "charged the Hearst government with wholesale corruption of Jewish voters in southwest Toronto by the distribution within two days of between three and 5000 bottles of Vishnick' - rumoured to be cherry brandy of up to 62 per cent proof spirits!" As the Ottawa Journal (which served a significantly Catholic community) editorialized, "Is it simply that Mr. Dewart, with cheap cunning, thinks it safe to go to any lengths, regardless of the feelings of the Jewish people of Ontario, who are not numerous, in the hope of gaining the votes of other people whom he thinks are prejudiced against the Jewish race?"115 Another important aspect of the social history of drinking is the care and control of the alcoholic. As MacLeod has concluded, the image of the drunkard was transformed in the second half of the nineteenth century from one of mere disorderliness to that of a neglected mental patient. In the i86os and 18705 numerous attempts were made in the British Parliament to establish inebriate asylums, without success. Advocates of the Inebriate Bill cited evidence of the Canadian Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic to make their case.116 The experience of the reformatory in Scotland, studied by David Smith, likely was the norm; it became an institution for women convicted of prostitution and child cruelty, since magistrates were reluctant to incarcerate male bread-winners and further burden relief agencies.117 Despite its lack of popular support, the inebriate asylum was persistently proposed as a solution to the problem of alcoholism in most Western nations. As Jim Baumohl relates in his essay on "Inebriate Institutions in North America, 1840-1920" in this volume, at various times the asylum alternative was promoted by temperance societies, physicians, and officials in the correctional and welfare services. Patterned after insane asylums, the inebriate institutions were also advocated not simply to treat the inmate in a sterile, regimented, and rural setting but to shield the community from their presence on public streets.118

24 Drink in Canada

The control of the alcoholic, particularly as he or she was associated with crime and indigency, became a public concern with the apparent rise, indeed epidemic, of convictions for drinking offences. Smith concludes, however, that the reorganization of police procedures and jurisdictions in the late Victorian era accounted for much of the apparent rise in drunkenness during this period. Rises in arrests invariably coincided with periods of increased police vigilance.119 The enactment of prohibition proved embarrassing and controversial for many physicians in both the United States and Canada who considered alcohol to be an effective medication. During the half-century before prohibition, liquor had declined as a necessary medicine, and between 1910 and 1920 the ninth revision of the u.s. Pharmacopoeia deleted whisky and brandy for the first time since 1850. However, during the 1924 Senate hearings on prohibition, physicians recommended malt liquors for "convalescence, improving the appetite, neurasthenia, senile decay, malnutrition, lowered vitality, digestive ailments, wasting diseases and nursing mothers." Many physicians argued that during the influenza epidemic of 1919, spirits saved many lives.120 In Saskatchewan, for instance, where there was a shortage of physicians in many areas due to the epidemic, the government was forced to enact emergency legislation permitting the sale of spirits by pharmacists without a prescription. So abused was this measure, however, that it was rescinded five days later.121 Finally, a favourite topic in the history of alcohol has been the prohibition experience; the account of bootlegging, rum-running, and speakeasies has been one of the great romances of the twentieth century.122 Robert Campbell has argued that "because of the influence of the American media, many Canadians believe that prohibition begat a drunken decade of violent crime and racketeering ... For Canada [this image] has little relevance."123 Michael Marrus adds that the largest supplier of whisky during Canadian prohibition was not the Bronfman family but the prosaic Hudson's Bay Company.124 The glamour may be fading, but the prohibition era was not prosaic.125 One month after the Scott Act took effect in Charlottetown, the local newspaper observed: "It is a noted fact that there is very near as much liquor drunk as ever and that it is not all got by the innumerable invalids that throng the drug stores, nor all purchased from the vendors. Are there not saloons in this city selling over the counter as openly as ever?"126 Across Prince Edward Island, "after nightfall, it is not safe for a decent traveller to pass some of these [rum shanties] without being molested and hooted at by these

25 "John Barleycorn Must Die"

drunken rowdies, which is to say the least, a disgrace to any civilized community, when the majority of the intelligent electors have voted against it."127 Throughout the Maritime provinces, a region of prolonged economic depression, extensive prohibitory laws were enacted that were as extensively transgressed. Rum-running and bootlegging were significant components of the economy, as Ernest Forbes and Jacques Paul Couturier recount here in their essays on attempts to control the trade in New Brunswick. The region's large contingent of Baptists, however, produced fervent supporters of the movement. The province's early adoption of prohibitory laws (Fredericton v. The Queen was a landmark ruling of the Privy Council regarding provincial and federal jurisdictions) may have mitigated temperance support over time. As C. Mark Davis has concluded, the Scott Act was heartily adopted, and leaked everywhere.128 Without support from a large segment of the community, including many public officials, the municipalities transformed the unpopular liquor convictions into regular fines, which underwrote municipal expenditures. According to Forbes, this was common practice even in the English-speaking communities in New Brunswick, as well as in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Forbes concludes that the debate over the repeal of prohibition in the Maritimes in the 19203 was really a debate over revenue rather than access to liquor. Under prohibition, municipalities collected liquor revenues in the form of fines; when liquor consumption was legalized, the provinces collected the revenue through taxation. As in other jurisdictions in North America, prohibition was finally defeated by the provinces' shortages of funds for hospitals, schools, and welfare.129 Prohibition in the prairie provinces has also received considerable attention from historians. The province of Manitoba, one of the first to promote prohibition, was quickly disillusioned by its evolution. As in other jurisdictions in North America, the loopholes offered to physicians and pharmacists, along with widespread bootlegging, led to diminishing respect for the law. A spate of bank robberies on the American border put prohibition into further disrepute.130 With the establishment of the Manitoba Moderation League in 1920 and the Beer and Wine League in 1923 (the latter a front for the brewers and hotel-keepers), organized opposition to prohibition led to its defeat. The establishment of the Moderation League and its American counterpart, the Association against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), undercut the moral monopoly held for a century by the prohibitionist forces. While it might be argued that the AAPA disputes

2.6

Drink in Canada

Gusfield's model, since its members were of the same class and ethnic background as the temperance forces, its raison d'etre was the violence and corruption associated with American prohibition. Furthermore, the AAPA was the product of the Great Depression, an era of which the "status anxiety" of elites would appear to be selfevident. 131 The defeat of prohibition in Canada did not open the floodgates of the vats, so to speak, as was the immediate result in the United States. Rather, Canada followed and improved upon the British model of liquor licensing laws. As Robert Campbell discusses in the final essay in this volume, "Profit was just a circumstance," the postprohibitionist philosophy of liquor control in British Columbia, and indeed in Canada generally, was expressed "as a set of legal limits placed on access to alcohol, as authority over the liquor traffic, as political power, and as part of the moral issue of liquor."132 Revenue and patronage would substitute for the dry millennium, although succeeding provincial administrations would wrestle with the virtue of being in the liquor business and profiting therefrom. The morality debate has finally succeeded at least in raising the financial stakes of liquor revenue, since no Canadian government in recent years has demurred from taxing the "sin" of drinking, and few Canadians immersed in the heritage of temperance - have raised their voices against this particular source of revenue. It is unlikely, and perhaps undesirable, that John Barleycorn will die, but he may be controlled at last.

2 Dry Patriotism: The Chiniquy Crusade JAN NOEL

Between 1848 and 1851 thousands of French-speaking Catholics in the Province of Canada came forward in their parish churches to take the temperance pledge. As word of this conversion reached non-Catholics across North America, the reaction was one of pure astonishment. For several decades evangelical Protestants had laboured long and hard to eradicate drunkenness; and now a Catholic priest was securing more converts in a single day than these earlier workers had won with years of steady effort. Contemporaries shook their heads and laid it down to the eloquent charm of Father Charles Chiniquy. This idea has stood the test of time; the full-length biography of Chiniquy published by Canadian historian Marcel Trudel in 1955 attributed the priest's vast influence to "honeyed flattery" and other excesses of his oratory.1 When we move beyond personal qualities to examine Chiniquy in the context of his times, however, it appears that his popularity was not a product of eloquence alone. The man's impact was greater than this exclusive emphasis on his speaking ability would suggest. One function of charismatic leaders is to mediate between old and new authority,2 to usher in a changing of the guard. Chiniquy was part of a much broader process in which a whole people took a turn to the right, rejecting radical politics and turning instead to ecclesiastical leadership in times of change. Since former anticlericals became ardent admirers of the church-led temperance crusade, it seems quite possible that this startling success played a part in establishing the Catholic church as arbiter of social questions in

28 Drink in Canada

French Canada. Because the church retained this decisive influence for a full century, Chiniquy's contribution to its prestige at a crucial time was more important than his fleeting effect on the consumption of alcohol. The greater submissiveness of French Canadians after 1840 is in little doubt, not just on the question of drinking but in a general receptivity to the teachings of their church. Historians have noted the transformation of French-Canadian society in the dozen years following the rebellions of 1837-383 Before the rebellions the Parti patriote, led by the flaming orator Louis-Joseph Papineau, commanded both the Assembly and the popular imagination. Besides objecting to British rule, these leaders also acted in opposition to their own clergy, who acquiesced in that rule. Many Patriotes, inspired by liberal currents in Europe and America, opposed church control in such vital areas as education and tithing. Before the 18303 ended, thousands of people joined the uprising that the Patriotes led. In the decade that followed, though, the church recovered the popularity it had lost, and a new fervour arose among the people. There were many signs of Catholic renewal. The clergy grew in number and offered an unprecedented variety of institutions and services. Processions and pilgrimages proliferated, and streets were renamed in honour of saints. The hierarchy began to forge an alliance with elected politicians, and an agreement with the Reform Party on an education bill was one important outcome. Impressed with this new vigour in an old institution, influential individuals began to endorse its efforts. Etienne Parent, longtime editor of Le Canadien and French Canada's leading intellectual, abandoned his former scepticism to support an activist social Catholicism that envisaged priests as national leaders. Another intellectual and former Patriote, Frangois-Xavier Garneau, held out slightly longer. A critical attitude towards the clergy surfaced in the first volume of his Histoire du Canada in 1845. By the time the third volume appeared four years later, Garneau, after weathering much criticism, was ready to concede that religion and nationality were inseparable. It took some time for the changed climate to affect everyone. Enthusiastic converts to secular liberalism did not relinquish their ideas without resistance, and it was not until Confederation that conservative Catholic influences really stifled liberal expression.4 By 1850, however, it was clear which way the wind was blowing. In the midst of this reorientation of French Canadian society, the temperance movement enjoyed its years of greatest success. The movement appears to have made its own contribution to the church's new-found prestige. It created a large, enthusiastic body of

29 Dry Patriotism

supporters for the clergy's vision of moral reform. It also propelled a priest into the position of national hero. Cutting down on drinking was a surprisingly popular idea that enhanced the status of Father Chiniquy and other priests who championed it. A distinctive feature of the French Canadian temperance leadership was the near absence of "self-made men/' the evangelical businessmen and labour aristocrats who were prominent in other places with strong temperance movements such as the United States, English Canada, and northern England. Perhaps because of the relative scarcity of French Canadian entrepreneurs, the initiative remained largely in the hands of the priests. Nor does temperance seem to correlate as closely as it did in America and Britain with industrialization,5 since the movement peaked before Montreal's industrial transformation of the 18505 and, in any case, enjoyed more enduring success in rural parishes than in urban ones. Priestly monopoly of leadership also meant that women played a less active role in French Canadian temperance campaigns than they did elsewhere.6 Two distinctive currents accounted for anti-drink sentiment in French Canada. The first was a desire for a more progressive society on the part of left-leaning professionals, the group associated with rebellion in the 18305 and in subsequent decades with the rouge political group and with the Institut canadien. The other current stemmed from the program for an uncompromisingly Catholic state presented by ultramontane clergymen from the 18405 on through the nineteenth century. This concurrence on temperance is noteworthy in light of the fact that the more usual stance of liberals and ultramontanes was poles apart, with swords drawn. Part of the reason temperance could appeal to both liberals and conservatives was that drinking had become a serious problem among the predominantly French-speaking population concentrated in Lower Canada (or, as it was renamed in 1841, Canada East). The habitant had kept much of his French culture intact after the British takeover in 1760, but he had the misfortune to adopt the drinking habits of his British and American cousins. Although Governor Murray had reported in 1762 that the newly conquered population was a sober one,7 things changed with the influx of cheap rum from the British West Indies. When British traders who had recently settled in the country discovered that rum was one of the few trade items that the relatively self-sufficient farmers were willing to buy, they made the substance available in quantity. By the 17905 travellers were reporting that the French Canadians were heavy drinkers.8 To add to the already abundant supply, local pro-

30 Drink in Canada

duction of alcohol also increased in the early nineteenth century, and the introduction of a steam process for distilling made domestic liquor cheap as well. In 1807 Le Canadien expressed alarm that the taste for spirits "has spread markedly in this country."9 Everywhere reasons arose for taking a glass - or four. As the towns grew, sanitation problems increased, and Montrealers began to doctor their dubious water with brandy before drinking it. Towns also suffered from a lack of recreation facilities, and drinking was one of the few amusements available to the lower classes. This is not to imply that their "betters" were more temperate. Gentlemen saw no disgrace in bibulous banquets and late-night carousing, and moralists began to attribute the decline of many seigneurs' sons to drink.10 The bitter climate also invited heavy use of the liquor now so freely available; outdoor labourers, carters, and farmers came to consider alcohol a necessary warmer and stimulant. According to both clerical and lay observers, drinking reached its height in many parishes in the 18305. Indeed, when French Canadian temperance groups began to appear after 1837, one society's idea of reform was to restrict members to six small glasses of liquor a day." Forces were in the making, though, to curb this convivial lifestyle. Particularly keen on transforming French Canada was a cluster of ultramontane clergy who believed the church should play a decisive role in both the social and political spheres. Their leader was Ignace Bourget, who became bishop of Montreal in 1840. Often viewed as a reactionary, Bourget was in some ways a most effective social reformer. He laid the groundwork for a system of local schools by recruiting large numbers of clergy to teach in them. When concern arose that too many French Canadians were emigrating to New England, he helped to arrange settlement in the Eastern Townships and other regions where farmland was still available. As local farm folk and Irish immigrants poured into Montreal, Bourget's clergy created a whole range of magdalene homes and orphanages, hospitals and asylums, and a school for the deaf founded on the most upto-date principles. Responding dynamically to the grave concerns of the day, the ultramontane wing of the church had not yet assumed its classic conservative, or bleu, coloration. Bishop Bourget was in many ways a thoroughly modern man of the 18405. He identified more with the reforming middle classes than the comfortable aristocracy. He seemed to find congenial the nostrums of Samuel Smiles, who inspired the mid-nineteenth-century English-speaking world with his biographies of Britain's "Self-Made Men." Like Protestant reformers, he encouraged prudence and thrift, and he declared idle-

31 Dry Patriotism

ness the mother of all vice. He urged college directors to place less emphasis on Latin and more on preparing the young for farming and trade. Along with practical education, he encouraged workers' savings banks and insurance schemes.I2 Another modernizing feature of the bishop's program was temperance. Despite the movement's American origins, Bourget did not dismiss it as a Protestant cause the way his predecessor, Bishop Lartigue, had done. On the contrary, he was convinced that drunkenness was the "mal capital de ce pays,"13 that drinking on saints' days was a prime cause of sexual immorality and domestic strife, and that it was possible to change such customs. Indeed, he supported radical change. By 1845 the prelate had accepted another conclusion that Protestant temperance leaders had reached: that total abstinence was the only way to prevent backsliding in a world in which there was such constant temptation to overindulge in drink. Like the Protestants, Bourget upheld the extreme measure as a charity the strong should undertake to help other, weaker souls who were unable to drink a little without drinking a lot.14 Bourget was a key figure in mid-century temperance efforts in French Canada, which would begin with a religious revival in 1840 and reach a crescendo in the Chiniquy crusade of 1848-51. Although a few temperance societies modelled on those in Catholic Ireland appeared around Quebec City in 1838, French Canadian temperance did not reach a wide audience until Bishop Bourget invited a hellfire-and-damnation preacher from France to conduct a series of parish revival meetings in 1840-41.15 Tactics such as darkening the church and recreating the sounds of hell so vividly that women and children were warned to stay away helped to touch off a reveil religieux in some sixty parishes from Gaspe to Bytown. Many lapsed Catholics used the occasion to return to the sacraments, and a number of parishes erected large public crosses to symbolize their newfound fervour. To help sustain penitents now resolved on sober virtue, temperance societies were set up at the time of the reveil. The response, though not overwhelming, was positive. At the close of sessions held in September 1840 at the parish of Notre-Dame de Quebec, a great crowd of men and women, including prominent citizens and people from surrounding parishes, joined the new temperance organization. There was also a favourable response at TroisRivieres. But Montrealers, who were not noted for obedience to the clergy and who lived in a distilling centre, were not so enthusiastic. The town's elite demurred, and the women did not join. Unlike Quebeckers, few Montrealers pledged total abstinence; but several

32 Drink in Canada

thousand men did promise greater moderation - and men, as the heavier drinkers, were the major focus of temperance work in French Canada.16 Montreal's journal L'Aurore called upon the principal citizens to support the society, urging that it was not, as many supposed, only for drunkards. Still, most of the early members were drawn from the lower classes, who were willing to brave such prejudice.17 Overall, the revert gave impetus to reform. Several priests began to circulate to preach temperance, and in 1844 it was reported that there were 75,000 Catholic temperance society members in Canada East.l8 They seem to have had some impact on drinking habits, too. Archbishop Joseph Signay of Quebec congratulated his people on a marked increase in sobriety. Individual rum-sellers noted a drop in buyers, and there was a decline in imports of the hard liquor these early societies condemned. While there was no dramatic change in custom, it appears that a number of people in the region around Quebec City did reduce their consumption of alcohol.19 Involved in Quebec temperance work from its beginning was a small, dark-eyed priest named Charles Chiniquy. The son of a Kamouraska notary, Chiniquy had lost both parents early in life. He had been encouraged by a friendly local priest to enter the seminary, and after ordination he began his priestly career as a chaplain at the Quebec Marine Hospital. There he had worked with Dr James Douglas,20 a Scottish-born temperance advocate, and had begun to read English-language temperance literature. Before long Chiniquy was convinced that many of the ills he saw at the hospital could be traced to drink. Father Chiniquy and several other priests had begun preaching temperance some months before the religious revival got underway.21 Their hopes had been raised by the temperance work of Father Theobald Mathew in Ireland, a campaign that was said to be creating a moral revolution among his people. After founding a temperance society in his own Beauport parish in 1839, Father Chiniquy perceived such a dramatic new commitment to morality and to schooling that he had a temperance column erected in order to record for future generations the miraculous transformation of the people of Beauport. This ceremony was no trifling affair. It included seven choirs of women in snowy robes, an equestrian contingent, a sea of banners, dozens of ecclesiastics, and ten thousand chanting parishioners, all marching in procession to immortalize Chiniquy's accomplishment.22 The little Quebec suburb was perhaps a modest stage for this maestro, but his day would come.

33 Dry Patriotism

As the 18405 progressed, French Canada was to face increasing difficulties. Appalling misery and growing fears of crime accompanied the influx of Irish famine immigrants after 1847; meanwhile, French Canadians migrated in swelling numbers to the United States. Respected figures in the community would join Chiniquy in relating the problem of drink to poverty and crime, and to French Canada's ability to survive in the midst of the rapidly advancing anglophone communities in North America. While the religious revivalists had presented temperance as a path to personal salvation, the emphasis during the second half of the decade would shift to drying up the vale of tears here below. This more worldly wave of temperance sentiment had some radical associations - most notably with Judge Charles Mondelet. Serving first in the circuit and then in the superior court at Montreal, Mondelet was one of the few laymen in French Canada to become a leader in the temperance cause. He was a man of independent mind whom one historian has called a follower of Voltaire.23 No party man, he had broken with the Patriotes in the 18305 over what he considered their extremism; yet he acted as defence counsel for those same Patriotes when they were imprisoned in 1837. The next year he too suffered arrest. Shortly afterwards he published his Letters on Elementary and Practical Education, which heavily influenced the provincial education act of 1841. Mondelet had not taken the clerical path to temperance beliefs; his conversion was probably due not to the reveil but to the influence of his father, a coroner who had long maintained that drink was largely responsible for crime.24 On good terms with the city's young liberals, the judge was invited to address the Institut canadien on a variety of subjects during its peak of popularity in the late 18405. There he dispensed modernizing advice: to rise early, eat and drink moderately, and keep busy; to educate women, that they might raise the moral tone of the whole household; and to make tomorrow's society a rational one by keeping the young away from superstitious nursemaids.25 When Mondelet became a temperance activist around 1845, he introduced a secular and rouge strain into what had hitherto been a religious movement among French Canadians. Mondelet presented alarming evidence to the public. He had determined that drink was a contributing factor in seven-eighths of all crimes committed. Releasing to the press examples gathered during his years on the bench, he claimed that case after case had shown that excessive use of drink occasioned violence, arson, and theft. His hand was stengthened when both his fellow judge,

34 Drink in Canada

J.S. McCord, and the city jailer also acknowledged a strong correlation between drunkenness and crime. Mondelet further insisted that young criminals were learning their skills in taverns - veritable academies of crime, which drained off the money that should have been spent on education of a more wholesome kind.26 The judge insisted that the wealthy as well as the poor were guilty, and he supported the point by publicizing the drunken misconduct of seigneur's sons, including the death by delirium tremens of a young gentleman at Longueuil. The outspoken judge predicted that a sober population would wear a dramatically different character. Arson, suicide, and drunken accidents would become rare occurrences; public health and conduct would improve. The desire for education and self-improvement would become general and would lead Canada to new prosperity. In Mondelet's view, eliminating alcohol would bring about "a complete revolution in human affairs."27 When the felonies and tragedies were tallied, it seemed that curbing drink might be a progressive step. Mondelet's ideas appear to have found favour with the young intelligentsia, and discipline became more fashionable than dissipation. L'Avenir, the journal of the left-wing intellectuals, exhorted its readers to pass the long winter evenings in study and other forms of self-improvement. Young French Canadian leaders, the influential journalist Etienne Parent proudly noted in 1848, no longer fell prey to the dissipated habits that had claimed so many of their elders.28 Many other reformers became convinced that temperance was vital. The editor of the Lower Canadian Agricultural Journal, for instance, said that sobriety would improve farming in the most basic way, by making the farmer more vigorous.29 School superintendent J.B. Meilleur, who had advocated higher liquor taxes as a source of school funding, approved for use in the schools a temperance manual that had been written by Chiniquy.30 Political radicals such as T.S. Brown and Wolf red Nelson also endorsed the campaign against drink. Brown, who had led Patriote forces at Saint Charles, became a platform speaker on temperance, presenting "King Alcohol" as the great oppressor of the poor.31 By the late 18403, when Judge Mondelet called for the abolition of taverns, others were sufficiently alarmed about Montreal's growing crime and misery to agree. La Revue canadienne argued that for les grands maux one needed les grands remedes. Since it was intemperance that filled the streets with ragged beggars and the jails with criminals, then "down with licences for taverns, which for the most part are infamous hangouts for brigands ... down with these useless

35 Dry Patriotism

places full of idlers and sluggards who are the terror and the dread, the shame and despair of the towns and villages."32 Another cause of great concern was the growing number of French Canadians who were emigrating to the United States. Here again there were those who posited drink as a contributing factor. A legislative committee appointed to inquire into French Canadian migration singled out intemperance as a leading cause, finding that lumberjacks who frittered away their wages on wild living had no savings to fall back on when periodic slumps hit the timber trade. Thus, unemployed lumbermen were forced to emigrate. The committee also unearthed cases of farmers who compounded the chronic problems of scarce land and capital by drinking themselves into such heavy debt that they had to sell out and leave.33 As such testimony mounted, those who worried about French Canada's future began to see drink as a menace. The Quebec Committee on Reform and Progress passed temperance resolutions, and the Montreal Institut canadien chose Father Chiniquy as the appropriate lecturer for the subject of "National Industry and Economy." Hector Langevin, then at the beginning of his long political career, declared that drunkenness had become so serious that it had replaced assimilation as the great national peril: "This small people has grown ... its language and customs will not perish. But an even greater danger threatens it; this time it doesn't concern anglicization; it's the canker of intemperance that is devouring it, ravishing the dignity of the rational man."34 By the second half of the 18405 temperance had won sufficiently strong endorsement to become a French Canadian national crusade. The little cure's hour had come. Father Chiniquy's message can be summed up in one sentence: the national survival of French Canadians depends upon temperance. Avoiding the polarizing political issues of the rebellion era, Chiniquy focused on social and economic modernization that the people must undertake together. In the crisis atmosphere of the late 18405 he offered simple, timely relief. Giving up drink might be unpleasant, but it was preferable to the decay and disappearance of a people. By linking sobriety to patriotism, Chiniquy was able to unite religious and secular temperance supporters and to create a mass temperance fervour that had no parallel elsewhere in British North America. When he gathered a broad segment of the laity behind him in a national campaign, Chiniquy was exercising the expanded priestly leadership that lay at the heart of the ultramontane program. For, despite the fact that he was well regarded by liberal nationalists,

36 Drink in Canada

he was an ultramontane Catholic who championed an extension of church authority. He publicly proclaimed the rights of the church and the duty to submit to the pope. With the ultramontane's disregard for the dividing line between religion and politics, Chiniquy pronounced in favour of the Reformers in Parliament in a way even their leader, Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, considered improper.35 When the developing rift between Bishop Bourget and some of the more anticlerical rouges forced Chiniquy to choose a side late in his campaign, he was to declare that "all that which relates to virtue, order, justice and law is the domain of the priest, know that well."36 His visits to hundreds of parishes reinforced this authority on the local level. When he took his leave, a delegation of the local notables frequently came to thank him for changing their lives. He responded with unequivocal advice about where people were to turn in future difficulties. They must, as he told the people of Ste-Genevieve in the spring of 1849, "follow their good cure's wise counsel."37 This is not to argue that everyone who heard such advice took heed, but it certainly did the church no harm that the most popular hero of the decade endorsed its claims. While the austere bishop worked away in Montreal laying the solid foundations of the ultramontane state, the flamboyant lieutenant was out riding the highways and byways winning recruits for that state. The temperance pledge might perhaps be regarded as a pledge of allegiance. The evangelist began visiting parishes in the Montreal diocese to preach temperance in the early months of i848.38 After hearing his orations, hundreds and sometimes thousands, in parish after parish, stepped forward and pledged never again to drink. In the first eighteen months of campaigning Chiniquy visited no localities and persuaded 200,000 men, women, and children to take the pledge. He generated much excitement because, to a considerably greater extent than during the earlier campaign, there clearly was a mass renunciation of alcohol. Believing, as nineteenth-century temperance converts tended to do, that a dry world would be much brighter, the people became collectively optimistic. For once they were the ones in the vanguard of progress. They said that Chiniquy reminded them of the Patriotes and they called him the new Papineau - for, like the rebel hero, he offered them a vision of a radically better future. As the crusade progressed along the dusty backroads of Canada East, it swelled to a triumphal march. Whole parishes turned out to greet the temperance priests with flags and marching bands, militia musters, and cannonades. They quickly bought up ten thousand copies of his temperance manual, and they proudly hung his picture on their walls.

37 Dry Patriotism

Chiniquy continued to campaign through 1850 and most of 1851, towards the end preaching in the Quebec diocese as well. Largely due to the excitement that he generated, even parishes he did not visit hastened to take the pledge from other, lesser-known itinerant preachers. By 1850, 400,000 teetotallers,39 which amounted to nearly half the population of Canada East and a clear majority of the francophone population, had been won. Those who attribute this striking upsurge to Chiniquy's eloquence are not entirely mistaken. There was some real substance to his message, but there was also plenty of style. The young priest combined his timely nationalism with a platform manner that was almost irresistible. Editors seldom reprinted his speeches, and when they did, they paired them with apologies, complaining that they were unable to capture his effect.40 Part of this sprang from the suspense he built up by using stage effects, such as sudden unexpected appearances, which lead to rumours that he had arrived by miracle. When he strode out to face his audience, Chiniquy used his diminutive frame to maximum effect. People sometimes felt he was overrated when they first saw him, for he had the sad, sheepish look of a loser. But he approached the altar so solemnly that the crowd suddenly sensed a greater force than his own slight person at work. One observer reported that during the course of his sermons he seemed to transform himself from a lamb into a lion. At the climax he raised a large golden crucifix the pope had given him and asked various groups in the audience to strike down the Goliath of drink. He ended on an exultant note, urging mothers to dry their tears and children and pastors to rejoice, for together the parish was going to strike a blow on their behalf. Chiniquy's performances moved people to weep.41 The cure did not mince words with his audiences. Out in the country parishes he spoke about farm life and daily concerns, a departure from the usual formal sermon style. Farm families, shaken by several decades of agrarian crisis, were worried about competition from British and American immigrants, who seemed to till the soil so successfully. "How you complain," he told the people who packed into the village churches, "of the newcomers who seem to be invading our land, of the contemptuous way they treat you."42 Immigrants had already acquired the best town properties; ancient families were being driven from their seigneuries by the creditor's whip. "Your turn is coming," Chiniquy warned his audiences: "Yes, it is with a heart full of inexpressible sadness that I tell you: before many years, if a prompt and universal change doesn't take place among you, you will be driven from your houses, and your children

38 Drink in Canada

will remain there is the capacity of servants and slaves."43 God had deliberately sent the English, Scots, Irish, and Americans to punish Canada. The immigrants were not to blame, for their methods were entirely honourable: frugality, hard work, and a commitment to educating their children. It was almost a foregone conclusion that the French Canadians would lose their lands to these more disciplined people unless they were willing to give up the ruinous addiction that left them sluggish and disorganized. Chiniquy called town audiences, too, to embark on a new age of industry: "We ought not to bring from Europe what we can get at home. We have been upwards of two hundred years in Canada and we manufacture nothing, not even a pin or a button. I have been ashamed while travelling in the United States, and seeing their extensive manufactures, to think that we are yet in our cradles. Last year I heard a party of gentlemen on board a steamboat conversing about some great progress, which turned out to be the establishment of a manufactory of tobacco pipes! We suffer from a want of nationality, a want of union, a want of energy."44 Sober, schooled, and enterprising, French Canada would at last, the preacher promised, hold its own among the advanced countries of the world. One of Bishop Bourget's aims in establishing temperance societies was to replace the political clubs of the Rebellion era, to align the people with the cure rather than the tavern Dantons.45 There is plenty of evidence that Chiniquy did indeed sway the group it was hardest for the clergy to sway: Papineau's followers. Mondelet had already convinced a number of liberals that a sober people might have considerably fewer social problems, but the populist priest moved reform out the realm of theory. He actually persuaded the thirsty thousands to stop drinking; he seemed able to reverse longstanding customs in a way few would have predicted possible. In 1848 L'Avenir singled out Chiniquy as a priest moved by reason and love of country, a philanthropist who would relieve the people's distress by making them thrifty and sober. Public accolades for his work arrived from Mondelet and his friends, with the judge presenting Chiniquy with a gold medal before a crowd of some eight thousand in a ceremony at Longueuil. One convert in the parish of St-Caesaire who combined hatred for the political union with English Canada with love for Chiniquy expressed the utopianism of the hour: "The Union destroyed with time, and drunkenness gone, Lower Canada will be at the door of all the happiness we could wish for here below."46 When Chiniquy rode into the former rebel stronghold of StEustache in March 1849, the clerical victory seemed nearly complete.

39 Dry Patriotism

No rebels now, the people lined up to take the pledge. Thanking their visitor afterwards, the villagers compared themselves to the ancient Israelites. In what was perhaps an allusion to the Rebellion or to Governor Colborne's repression afterwards, they lamented that "the walls of the temple had risen up against them."47 They blamed it on their worship of a false god, the golden calf of drink. Now "Moses" - Chiniquy - had come to lead them into the promised land. There, with God's help and their cure's approval, they would find a new life. Any lingering doubts about their public submissiveness to bishop and governor were laid to rest in their spokesman's final ringing declaration: "Peace on earth to all men!" The sheep may have converted to the stern new moral order during the reveil. Chiniquy was now performing the harder task; he was bringing in the goats. Not only were priests and Patriotes reconciled; class distinctions, too, were temporarily blurred. Earlier temperance campaigns, in French Canada and elsewhere, had drawn most of their support from the working classes; Chiniquy brought people of influence into the fold as well. By the autumn of 1848 rouge and ultramontane newspapers agreed that he had won over "all the most respectable inhabitants of the country" and "all of French Canada's most eminent people."48 Mayors and other local notables came out to greet him; they chaired meetings that passed resolutions seeking tighter restrictions on the sale of drink. Even Protestants recognized the campaign as an unprecedented success. The Reverend William Taylor, a longtime leader in the English Canadian temperance movement, at a huge rally held in Montreal congratulated the priestly orator for his remarkable accomplishment. Also impressed was the Parliament of the Province of Canada, which awarded Chiniquy an honorarium of five hundred pounds for outstanding service to the country and passed restrictive tavern legislation that he had helped to draft. The fact was that French Canada had become quite startlingly dry. The 400,000 pledge-takers of 1848-51 had clearly stopped, or at least greatly reduced, their intake of alcohol. Taverns, which often closed when Chiniquy came to town, stayed shut after he left. By the autumn of 1848 forty parishes and townships in the Montreal district had closed their drinking places. By the next summer seventy-five parishes across Canada East were dry. By June 1849 nearly all the distilleries had suspended their operations,49 and scores of puncheons had been returned by country merchants who had no buyers (see Table i). Molson's, the largest distillery in the province, which had weathered earlier temperance campaigns without any serious

40 Drink in Canada Table i Canada East Distilleries Year

Gallons produced

1847 1848 1849 1850

645,386 317,840 246,920 79,914

Source: Ouellet, Histoire 2:617.

inconvenience, reported a loss of fifteen thousand pounds in 1849.5° When the Chiniquy crusade got underway, imports of alcohol sank to the lowest point in decades. Domestic production also hit bottom as the campaign crested in 1849-50. By 1850 Chiniquy had apparently succeeded in turning a society long known for its joie de vivre into the most bone-dry temperance stronghold in North America. Yet trouble was stirring. By September 1851 Bishop Bourget had received so much disturbing information about his prize preacher that he could delay action no longer. He had just received a woman's testimony - later affirmed under oath - that Chiniquy had attempted to seduce her. This was all the more worrisome because there was solid evidence that Chiniquy had done the same thing several years earlier. He had made overtures to a woman in the parish of St-Pascal during a week of temperance preaching there in 1846 - only to be thwarted by the local cure, who, notified by the woman, had appeared in her stead at the appointed place of rendezvous. This incident, never publicized, had been whitewashed; Father Brassard, a long-time friend of Chiniquy's, had convinced Bourget that the conduct ascribed had not been serious enough to warrant taking action against the promising young preacher. Evidence continued to mount, however, that Chiniquy was making advances to women he met in the course of his travels. By 28 September 1851 Bourget had heard enough. He wrote a letter ordering his troublesome hero to cease all pastoral work in the Montreal diocese.51 Thus it was that in October 1851 Chiniquy boarded a westbound train and went to work as a missionary to French Canadian settlers in Illinois. Whithin five years he incurred the wrath of the bishop of the Chicago diocese when he became the subject of allegations of sexual misconduct and disobedience to his superiors. Excommunicated from the Catholic church in 1856, he converted to Presbyteri-

41 Dry Patriotism

anism, married, and returned to Canada. He carved out a second career for himself, becoming a world-renowned writer and lecturer against the Catholic church. To the end he retained a fiery tongue, which he used to inflame the hearts of men. The most dramatic effects of the Chiniquy crusade did not last. While the orator's disgrace was not generally known, his absence was sufficient cause for a rapid plunge in enthusiasm. Tavernkeepers began setting up shop again when Chiniquy's campaign ground to a halt in the autumn of 1851. By 1852 Bourget was lamenting that enemies of temperance were attacking "de tous cotes, et avec fureur."52 Liquor consumption began to climb again. In 1853 brewer-distiller Thomas Molson wrote to a friend that the temperance movement had relaxed and plans were underway for expansion of his Montreal distilling operation.53 It is true that many of Chiniquy's rural converts continued to shun alcohol, and pockets of teetotal farmers in Quebec remained for decades afterwards. But in the towns particularly, many people returned to their old ways.54 Chiniquy's more significant contribution was probably that of mediating between old and new authority. Canadians of the 18303 had witnessed the failure of the radical and often anticlerical Patriotes. In the following decade the people had responded by turning their backs on radical politics and finding their hero in a temperance priest who championed the authority of the church. Chiniquy's devoutly Catholic phase did not last very long, but it seems quite possible that, as historians uncover more material on popular religious attitudes, we may find that the dry crusade helped to consolidate the new, enduring power of the church. Chiniquy had clearly secured a firm hold on the popular imagination; he had, as one contemporary put it, built "an altar in the heart of every Canadian."55 The church was slow to dethrone the popular idol even after he gave offence. Hoping to avoid scandal, Bishop Bourget kept silent about the priest's sexual misdemeanours, and the full story did not come out until the publication of Marcel Trudel's biography of Chiniquy in 1955 - more than a century after his expulsion from the Montreal diocese. Upset by Chiniquy's attacks on the Catholic church after his departure, the hierarchy did forbid the populace to attend a series of inflammatory lectures he gave on a return visit to Canada East in 1859; but the crowds simply could not stay away. Fifty years after his brilliant temperance crusade, an enormous contingent of French Canadians joined his funeral procession when he went to his final resting place in Montreal's Cote des Neiges Cemetery. Another fifty years had passed when professor Trudel observed in his biography of Chini-

42 Drink in Canada

quy, "Certainly in our French Canadian society, one speaks constantly of Chiniquy; he has even become with us an immense figure of legend."56 The mischievous Father Chiniquy turned well-established categories on their head in his own day as in ours. The preacher of the dull virtue of sobriety became the stuff of legend; the priest who would all too soon leave the church became a great Catholic Patriote in the public mind. By means of his tour de force of 1848-51 Chiniquy in all likelihood helped to forge the new and lasting image of the church as guardian of the national destiny. His work embodied the new Catholicism championed by Bishop Bourget and Etienne Parent. Losing the stigma of a reactionary, anti-nationalist force, the church re-emerged as the patriotic champion of reform. Today, when the legends have lost their listeners and the church is a shadow of its former self, perhaps Chiniquy can still surprise us, forcing us to reexamine a nineteenth-century society that has often been regarded as a paragon of Catholic isolationism. The popularity of the temperance movement, with its Protestant origins and its emphasis on Weberian virtues such as thrift, prudence, and industry, suggests a surprising eagerness on the part of French Canadians to come to an accommodation with an anglophone continent. In the 18405 Chiniquy's promises of survivance won support for virtues more commonly associated with the Anglo-American, Protestant side of Canada's heritage. Hoping to save itself, little Rome-on-theSt Lawrence crooked its knee to Samuel Smiles.

3 Temperance in Upper Canada as Ethnic Subterfuge GLENN J LOCKWOOD

Temperance suddenly appeared in British North America during the late 18205, at the same time it emerged elsewhere in the transatlantic world as an idea introduced by evangelical clergymen. Its rapid spread as a movement in a frontier society, with more than eighty lodges in Upper Canada alone by 1832, has not yet been satisfactorily explained. Various economic, religious, political, and class-based interpretations that explain the rise of temperance in long-established communities and societies have not addressed the question of why such a potentially unpopular cause should mushroom into a popular movement throughout a frontier society within a couple of years. Why should the backwoods farmers of Upper Canada, who all along had accepted heavy liquor consumption as a norm, suddenly stop drinking? Ethnicity is the missing variable that helps to explain the dramatic growth of interest among Upper Canadians in temperance around 1830. Temperance emerged as a cause at precisely the same time a flood of reactionary Orange Irish Protestants fleeing Catholic emancipation in Ireland inundated the colony and threatened to overwhelm the earlier settled population. This paper hypothesizes that temperance lodges springing up in the eastern Upper Canadian counties of Leeds, Grenville, and Lanark, first among American and Loyalist settlers and later among lowland Scottish immigrants, were used as a moral fagade. From behind this facade Reformers attempted to organize politically, away from the public meetings that could either be packed with or broken up by Irish Orange immi-

44 Drink in Canada

grants wielding clubs. Many temperance lodges were used as a cover by Reformers, in much the same way Irish Tories used Orange lodges to cloak political organizing. Temperance lodges sprang up just as British immigration to British North America quadrupled to an average of 46,000 persons per year in the early 18305. Irish immigrants in particular accounted for this jump in immigration; their numbers soared yearly, from 8,824 in 1828 to 25,679 in 1830 and 50,305 in 1832. * Most Irish arrivals in the 18305 were Protestants who had endured the rebellion of 1798, witnessed the Irish economy stagnate following the Napoleonic wars, and been buffeted by agrarian violence in the 18203. The Protestant minority soldiered on because of the many economic, religious, and political privileges they enjoyed in Ireland. But the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 by the British Parliament caused many Protestant families to panic at the prospect of the civil and religious gains of the Roman Catholic majority around them. They feared that Protestants as a minority had no future in Ireland, and concluded that immigration to British North America was their only alternative. The Irish Protestants soon flooding into Upper Canada overwhelmed the earlier-established Loyalists and American immigrants, who feared that the new arrivals would undermine their position in society. Plate i shows how extensively the Irish were distributed across Upper Canada as they became the single largest ethnic group in the colony, a distribution that took shape in the southern townships by the early 18305. The majority of Irish immigrants arrived in the 18305 and, to a lesser extent, in the 18405. They were transported westward along the newly opened Rideau military canal, resulting in a heavy concentration of Irish settlers in the Rideau townships, along the upper Ottawa, and in back townships behind the Loyalist settlements in the rest of Upper Canada. By the mid-Victorian era some 92,802 people, or 65 per cent of the 171,327 inhabitants of Leeds, Grenville, Lanark, Carleton, and Renfrew counties in eastern Ontario, were of Irish origin, twice the number of Irish inhabitants in Montreal and Toronto combined.2 A complex of interwoven ethnic, religious, and political fears and grievances began to develop within the host society as it found itself inundated by a tide of Irish immigrants in 1830, fears that could not be stated openly. Nativeborn Upper Canadians found an outlet for these fears and grievances in the temperance movement. Nothing cultural predetermined that Upper Canadians who originated in the American colonies rather than Irish immigrants would embrace temperance as a cause. Heavy liquor consumption was an

Plate \ Location of early temperance societies in Upper Canada in relation to the concentration of Irish immigrants reported in the 1871 census, by township. The earliest census recording ethnicity was taken forty years after the mass arrival of Irish Protestants, which spooked established American settlers into forming temperance societies. Still, the fact that most Irish immigrants arrived in Upper Canada during the 18303 (and to a lesser extent in the 18405) permits this map to show the relative concentrations of Irish settlement in three clumps of back townships. It also shows that temperance societies were formed in those townships with an uneasy numerical balance of newly arrived Irish immigrants and earlierestablished settlers. Source: Census of Canada 1871; M.A. Garland and James J. Talman, "Pioneer Drinking ... and the Rise of Temperance," in Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records 27, no. 3 (1931).

46 Drink in Canada

equally conspicuous aspect of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Ireland and British North America. In Ireland per capita whisky consumption on which excise duty was paid jumped sixfold between 1725 and 1777.3 Government did not discourage high liquor consumption because significant revenue from drink taxes flowed into the British treasury.4 Similarly, in British North America nearly every family kept a bottle in the house to "treat" guests and workmen, and community gatherings witnessed heavy drinking among all levels of society. Liquor was simply considered an absolutely normal accompaniment to whatever men did in groups.5 Before the late 18205 the only people who worried about heavy drinking were a few New England clergymen who warned against chronic drunkenness as a form of gluttony.6 In Upper Canada bush drudgery and high grain yields together produced a society as inebriated as that in Ireland and Britain. An inhabitant near Prescott asserted in 1830 that more people worshipped Bacchus than attended church: I need no other proof for this assertion, than daily observation. Go to ... the Logging-bees, the Husking-bees, and the Raising of Houses and Barns, and there you will find many who do homage to this deity. Attend the general muster of our Militia; visit the Grocer's shop or the Bar-rooms, and there too you will behold almost an innumerable number of those deluded worshippers of Bacchus ... They are so enthusiastic in their devotions, that when there is not only two or three of them met together, they are often found to have their Idol in their midst.7

Similar though their drinking legacies were, middle-class British immigrants, upon arriving in Upper Canada, used drinking habits as a pretext for differentiating between themselves and the established population. A moderate-drinking Scottish Presbyterian, the Reverend William Bell, upon arriving at American-settled Prescott in 1817 observed "that public morals were at a low ebb, drunkenness was quite common, and profane swearing almost universal,"8 and that beer and whisky were available for sale as a matter of course at American Methodist camp meetings. Another Scottish immigrant, the Reverend John McLaurin, observed that the older American settlers "were almost all Soldiers in the American War, and from their early manner of living, and the easy rate at which spiritous liquors may be had in this Province, added to the want of religious instruction, they have contracted careless and extravagant habits."9 At locks along the Rideau Canal such as those at Smith's Falls, Colonel

47 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

John By reserved large adjacent areas of land "to prevent persons erecting Booths near the works for the sale of liquor."10 Stung by criticism impugning their morality, regional Methodists, who were mostly American in origin, in 1828 vowed to "henceforth use all our influence ... to discourage and abolish the use of ardent spirits altogether save only as a medicine on extreme cases."11 The Loyalist editor of the Methodist Christian Guardian in 1830 responded to accusations of widespread drunkenness in American settlements by singling out the British-settled Bathurst district, where in 1828, he claimed, there were twenty inquests tracing the cause of death to overuse of ardent spirits.12 The only negative references to liquor in Upper Canada before the late 18205 were connected either with illegal sales or with drunkenness as a mark against the respectability of members of the fledgling local elites vying with one another for plum patronage positions. The crime of which Patrick Nowlan was convicted in 1820 in Beckwith Township - selling liquor without a licence - was a simple matter of defrauding government of liquor revenue.13 When Captain John LeBreton of Nepean Township was taken to task in 1821 for providing workers at his estate with liquor, he defended his behaviour by claiming that if he did not stock it, he would lose the workmen.14 LeBreton was attempting to justify his involvement, as a gentleman, in the ungenteel business of selling liquor. No one would have dreamed of suggesting that it was unaristocratic to drink; it was rather dealing in trade that made questionable LeBreton's claims to gentility. Most gentry in Upper Canada were merchants or half-pay officers whose aspirations to gentility were very recent. They were influenced by the growing gulf between classes in the industrializing British Isles that made drunkenness, as opposed to moderate drinking among the middle class, increasingly unacceptable.15 Hence an Irish officer at Perth, J.H. Powell, wrote to the lieutenant-governor's secretary in 1825, confiding that the inebrious conduct of John Robinson, formerly a half-pay adjutant of local militia in Scotland, made him a poor example in local society to be promoted.16 In the same vein, George Rankin at Bytown in 1828 declined to act as a magistrate, claiming that a person of honour could not associate with tavern-keepers nor with Alexander Christie,17 who another nominee agreed was "unfit for any public office [because] he is continually at the bottle."18 Despite universal heavy drinking before 1828, drunkenness was being used as a lever by British aspirants to local gentility as they vied for prominent positions in society.

48 Drink in Canada

Temperance as a movement originated in the United States in the late 18205 and spread to Britain and to British North America very rapidly. The temperance question was non-existent in 1825, yet three years later it was a middle-class obsession in the northeastern United States, and almost immediately appeared in Ireland and Scotland. Societies were founded in Nova Scotia and Montreal in 1827 and in Upper Canada in 1828.19 By 1831 some seventy-four temperance societies had been formed in Upper Canada alone (see Plate i).20 There are various explanations for the rise of temperance. M.A. Garland, James J. Talman, and Graeme Decarie argue that the Upper Canadian movement was a natural response to excessive pioneer drinking as society became more sophisticated, and was simply an extension of the American movement.21 Ernest Dick notes that the popular impetus for temperance in Nova Scotia came very directly from New England along the same axis as the earlier religious revivals. Congregationalist evangelist Lyman Beecher's famous "Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance" were widely circulated and quoted in Nova Scotia after they had been published in 1826 (Halifax edition published in 1830) ... Baptist preachers of the Annapolis Valley ... avidly read Lyman Beecher's sermons and preached the first temperance sermons.22

Charles Wood explains the temperance movement within Upper Canadian Methodism as part of North American fundamentalism.23 Brian Harrison has shown that Methodists in England, in contrast with their brethren in Upper Canada, were reluctant and among the last denominations there to embrace temperance.24 Paul Johnson attributes the new perception of drinking as a problem in late 18205 Rochester, New York, to a changing relationship between master and wage earner as "proprietors turned ... workshops into ... little factories ... and devised standards of discipline, self-control, and domesticity that banned liquor."25 James Qemens argues that temperance was a middle-class Canadian alarmist response to the influx of Irish famine immigrants in the 18405.26 Jean Burnet, by contrast, argues that Canadian temperance leaders aspired to a respectability that eluded them due to their American origins, radical politics, and nonconformist religion.27 Janet Noel interprets temperance agitation as the translation of radical religion into "an emotional and self-confident campaign for social and political reform ... [by] channeling] popular discontent into a less direct attack on a reactionary colonial elite and an irresponsible government."28

49 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

Elizabeth Malcolm argues that temperance in Ireland between 1829 and 1900 was transformed from a loyalist Protestant cause into a Catholic nationalist mass crusade for moral regeneration, often with revolutionary overtones. Capuchin monk Father Theobald Mathew promoted temperance to reduce social misery in Ireland, but he was unable to prevent his total-abstinence crusade from being associated with Daniel O'Connell's political repeal movement, and he was unable to prevent people from reading political connotations into his work.29 At the very time a compelling and widespread yearning for religious, political, economic, moral, and social reform emerged in transatlantic middle-class society, the published sermons of the Reverend Lyman Beecher acted as a catalyst for the temperance cause emerging in North America during the late 18203. The temperance gospel was used by groups varying from one country to another as a vehicle for eliminating disparate social problems and as a moral rationalization to cover other objectives. Although the temperance movement emerged in British North America at the same time as it did in other regions of transatlantic society, there were particular circumstances in the frontier society of Upper Canada that caused it to find immediate acceptance. The temperance message obviously struck a strong chord in a society where overconsumption of alcohol was rife. Simply because drinking had been an ongoing social custom in the British North American colonies for generations, the few thoughtful members of society were by no means blinded to the abuse of women and the general bouts of violence heavy drinking produced, and their concerns gained in influence as congregations began to be organized and churches built in unprecedented numbers in the late 18205. Most of the churches being built were put up by British immigrants, which only added to the unease and insecurity of American-origin settlers as they watched their Irish neighbours in particular make rapid progress by working in groups and even hiring American settlers to help develop their properties. Within this context the temperance message was desperately grasped by American-origin inhabitants to stave off potential assimilation of the younger generation by Irish Protestant immigrants, and as a cover for organizing politically in response to Orangeism. The heavy inflow of British immigration, particularly from Ireland, made the earlier-established American settlers distinctly uneasy. They camouflaged their discomfort behind facades of welcome and assistance, petitioning government for additional funds to care for the destitute immigrants afflicted with cholera who poured in during the early 18305. What

50 Drink in Canada

else could they do? To complain about the Irish flood would be interpreted by government as disloyalty, and yet the more Irish that arrived, the more precarious seemed the position of the original settlers in regional society. The defensiveness and insecurity of American settlers as they beheld British immigrants taking up land among them is evident in English immigrant Susanna Moodie's account of the greeting she received from a young American woman the day the Moodies arrived at their clearing in 1832. Mrs Moodie assumed that the young woman was seeking a position as servant: "How!" responded the creature, "I hope you don't take me for a help. I'd have you to know that I'm as good a lady as yourself. No; I just stepped over to see what was going on. I see'd the teams pass our'n about noon, and I says to father, "Them strangers are cum; I'll go and look arter them." "Yes," says he, "do - and take the decanter along. May be they'll want one to put their whiskey in."

As Moodie fumbled for words to thank her guest, the young woman interjected, "Now, don't go to call me 'gal' - and pass off your English airs on us. We are genuine Yankees, and think ourselves as good - yes, a great deal better than you. I am a young lady." The next morning, "Well, I guess you look smart," said the Yankee damsel, presenting herself once more before me. "You old country folks are so stiff, you must have everything nice or you fret. But, then, you can easily do it; you have stacks of money; and you can fix everything right off with money."30

As American immigration into Canada was discouraged following the War of 1812, American inhabitants became increasingly resentful of growing British immigration. They perceived that the Rideau military settlements and the canal were being established to counter the strong American influence in settlements along the St Lawrence. In 1820 two hundred stand of arms and two light field-pieces were placed at Perth and Richmond to induce British military settlers "to keep up that spirit of loyalty and British feeling which exists now but which might give way to evil communications with these Americans who really swarm in the woods near Brockville."31 The chief justice of Upper Canada in 1820 assessed Brockville-area inhabitants as "Yankees & openly speak as such, violent and disobedient to the Laws & disposed to do everything they dare to hurt these new [British] back settlements."32 American settlers as "a large majority of

5i Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

our whole population" were understood to question the post-war "policy of promoting emigration from the British European dominions, and excluding settlers from the United States."33 And th'en, in a move that took away the breath of American Reformers, local Compact Tory leaders, whose electoral support was beginning to slip, made a desperate alliance with Orange Master Ogle Gowan, accepting support from the growing Irish Protestant population. From 1829 on there were few aspects of society that the Americanorigin settlers did not invest with cultural or ethnic significance in response to the flood of Irish immigrants settling among them. They found themselves seeking to justify their place in society. They moved within a few years from stoutly asserting in 1827 that, as a majority of the electors, only inhabitants of American origin would be elected for years to come34 to protesting by 1833 that they were equally as loyal as British immigrants.35 They recognized the coded allusion to Irish ascendancy implicit in the remark that, although at one time in Upper Canada "nothing but basswood could be obtained, ... now that we have better timber let us use the Oak and Laurel."36 They read statements in regional Irish Tory newspapers repudiating the hostility of local American officials, insisting on Irish immigrant supremacy, and they noted Orange demagogue Ogle Go wan's overt marshalling of Irish settlers against Americans to gain election.37 They viewed with alarm references in local Irish Tory-edited newspapers to British immigration swelling the loyal population and replacing valueless Yankees.38 Smaller communities of American settlers along the Rideau River became alarmed in the late 18203 by the extensive canal works attracting "many hundreds of various descriptions of Characters, independent of the permanent ... inhabitants, among whom peace and good order are indispensably necessary to be attended to, and preserved."39 The potential for violence by Irish immigrants at elections, at musters of militia, at public meetings, at fairs as a form of recreation and to intimidate older settlers became a matter of serious worry to many American-origin inhabitants. The Irish Protestant majority among the British immigrants entering the region were the principal concern of the Americanorigin settlers. Although many Scottish immigrants joined Americans in supporting political reform, the Americans feared that, if ever they were lured over to join the Irish, British immigrants united would inevitably render local Americans powerless. Not only American immigrants but many Loyalist families feared the ramifications of the ongoing appeal by Ogle Gowan for "a general amalgamation of loyal Britons" to unite in electing British candidates, in the same

52 Drink in Canada

way that, during the Napoleonic wars, "all loyal men and true stood together in the crisis of their country's difficulties ... engaged for the same Sovereign ... battled the same foe, stood on the same field, the dead buried in the same grave, and the living triumphed in the same victory."40 It was inescapable that most immigrants arriving were Irish Protestants,41 and they threatened "in a few years [to] render British feeling and British interest paramount,"42 making the interests of local American-origin settlers subservient. The growing fear of being overwhelmed was all too evident when an American-born inhabitant at Brockville inquired in 1833: "What are we to think of those characters who demand superior claims, from our Government, to those of their fellow-subjects, either in church or state, and openly declare that those claims of superiority are the only Tie that binds them to the constitution; making the rights of superiority supercede the rights of equality; - denominating the rights of man a levelling system that should be exploded?"43 American Reformers could not ignore the note of triumph and the implicit threat to their place in society when a Tory Loyalist, Henry Sherwood, predicted at an 1832 public meeting in Brockville "that if Emigration goes on as it has done for some years past, a bulwark of British feeling will be erected, against which the waves of Democracy may beat in vain for ages."44 American-origin settlers in the Brockville area became especially disturbed in the early 18305 by the rhetorical claims of superior loyalty to Britain made by Irish immigrants in the local press. As well they might. Many older American-origin families in the region were known to have members who had deserted to the American side during the War of 1812 and who, once the war was over, returned telling "good and faithful Subjects that they had as good a right here as those who stood firm & fought during the war."45 Magistrates such as Major Thomas Smyth were known to have kept lists of such returned deserters, who, in the ordinary course of conversation in local taverns, had tended "to alienate the affections of many good subjects and lessen their attachment to His Majesty's service."46 Even before the Irish arrived, American-origin Loyalists such as Jonas Jones had urged that the Alien Bill was needed to counteract the American oath of allegiance, which explicitly abjured loyalty to the British monarch and which all Upper Canadians born in the United States had been obliged to swear.47 The resentment of local families at being labelled aliens and having to swear allegiance to the Crown was further fed every time Irish immigrants fastened on pranks such as hoisting an American flag near Merickville as proof

53 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

of disloyalty.48 The rebellion panic gave the Irish further cause to vaunt their greater loyalty while accusing local Americans of sowing sedition.49 Inhabitants of American origin recognized that military service was a major aspect of the Irish claim to superiority,50 one that Ogle Gowan exploited by printing numerous letters from Irish immigrants uncomfortable at serving under "Yankee" militia officers when experienced Irishmen were passed over.51 The Irish claimed to be discriminated against by American or "alien" juries and magistrates,52 and demanded a "purification of the magistracy" to replace magistrates of American origin.53 Irish immigrants touted themselves as generally better educated, better informed, and more literate than Americans.54 American settlers could not help but contrast their meagre religious resources with the lead taken by Irish Anglican clergymen, certainly in Leeds and Grenville counties, in building churches. These churches bespoke British funding with their sophisticated architecture, educated clergy, formal ritual, regular salaries, and regular schedules of services, in contrast with voluntarist American circuit-riders who sporadically visited settlements that gave them little more than board and lodging.55 American-origin settlers had only to pick up a copy of the Brockville Gazette to learn with what derision and disgust Irish immigrants regarded the traditional North American Methodist camp meeting: At their Camp Meeting they will frighten as many as they can, and they say it is the work of the Lord, and thus captivate the weak minded and the ignorant and tell them they have got religion. Their Camp Meetings, are meetings of confusion. At the hour of prayer, they all raise, some will be singing, some praying, some hollowing and some screaming and fainting, and others slapping their hands; confusion enough to distract the brains of any person. No one can tell what is said by any one. No wonder, then, that they are numerous, when people allow themselves to be tricked by them after this manner, and worst of all, to be frightened to join their number.56

What could American-origin Methodists, poorly organized as they were, say in rebuttal to charges by local Irish immigrant editors that Methodist itinerant preachers "on more than one occasion have ... been involved in serious embarrassments" and set an example "little better than a moral pestilence; ... blaspheme God's holy name, drink to intoxication, and profane the sacred Sabbath."57 American Methodists and Baptists enviously perceived that they were outsophisticated, outbuilt, outorganized, and even beginning to be outlegitimized by the so-called state churches to which the

54 Drink in Canada

incoming Irish immigrants belonged. In vain did theBrockville Recorder decry the dazzling splendour of bishops in the Irish church, the intolerant aristocratic goals of Irish clergy in preventing American voluntarists from marrying and owning property, in pilfering profits from clergy reserves, in countenancing Orange riots, and even in tolerating Orange processions to church. The Irish immigrants not only took such criticism in stride; if anything, they basked in it.58 From their ground in turn, local Irish Tory editors alleged that there were links between American Methodist camp meetings and revolutionary schemes.59 The earlier-established American population soon began to fear that the Irish threatened to replicate in Canada the authoritarian regime that until 1829 had favoured them in Ireland, rather than join in pressing for responsible government.60 They feared that Irish immigrants in official stations would work mischief against the common good,61 in the same way that Irish Protestants were used as political tools by the provincial elite and by Tory candidates. The Irish even perpetrated violence against American Reformers altruistically fighting for the rights of all free men.62 Election violence in Leeds County during the 18305 revealed how serious the Irish were about wresting power away from the American population. The very vocabulary of "the British victory over the Yankees at Brockville," of "driving radicals out,"63 and "British ascendancy" were continual reminders that the Irish viewed local Americans as a foe to be routed. To crown the edifice of American fears, Orange lodges in the late 18305 began receiving as members sons of the Tory Loyalist elite who recognized that the Orange Lodge held the key to political success. This development represented an abrupt turnabout for Loyalist Tories, who had previously criticized Orangemen for introducing religious and national bigotry to the region.64 It was no secret that Irish Tory immigrant political clout was due to the organizational nucleus of the Orange Lodge. When Orangemen broke up a public meeting at Brockville in 1832, Americanorigin inhabitants voiced their disgust with "all irritating distinctions, societies, badges and processions." They charged that "all endeavours to create distrust, dislike and opposition between the Irish and other Emigrants who have settled amongst us, and the settlers of the Province and their descendants, who first penetrated the interminable wilderness and amid extreme hardships and privations caused the country to present fertile fields and cultivated plains, are unjust, ungenerous and impolitic and can only be the work of self-interested or evilminded persons."65

55 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

Persistent fears of being politically outdistanced by Irish immigrants led on by demagogues brought American inhabitants to link Irish Protestants, the impenetrable and very political Orange organization, and the holding of Orange meetings in taverns with the need to curb liquor overconsumption. Jason Gould, an American-born inhabitant of Smith's Falls, in late 1832 accidentally walked into one of Ogle Go wan's political meetings packed with Irish Orangemen. Although he stayed only ten minutes, he viewed a sufficiently potent mixture of liquor overconsumption and anti-Yankee sentiment to be deeply troubled. Within a month Gould was active in the Smith's Falls Temperance Society.66 It is unlikely that American Reformers created temperance societies as an organizational counter-challenge to the Irish Tory Orange lodges. Instead, they quickly recognized the potential of temperance societies as a fagade behind which the activities of American and other Reformers could effectively be cloaked, and infiltrated them towards that end. During the first few years of the 18305, at the same time that Irish immigrants were inundating Upper Canada in record numbers and when it seemed that temperance societies were the last place that Orangemen would think of looking to find American-origin Reformers planning their political survival, the Reform nucleus added a dynamic to the network of temperance lodges springing up across the colony. So informal, or so secret were the meetings of temperance societies that no records from before 1845 have survived. The meetings of the inner circles of temperance lodges were no more reported in newspapers than were those of Orange lodges. The instant moral legitimacy with which temperance was invested by the American Reformers could not be arrested, at least not at first. Colonel Thomas Talbot in southwestern Ontario suspected that American "rebels" around him had "commenced their work of darkness under the cover of organizing Damned Cold Water Drinking Societies, where they met at night to communicate their poisonous and seditious schemes,"67 but most Irish Tory editors were not so sure. They at first preferred to allude subtly to secret meetings and "good causes" rather than to link temperance and American Reformers openly. The Brockville Gazette, for example, late in 1831 referred to a Grenville Reformer, "with the most yankefied modesty ... avowing Mr. Mackenzie's principes," who was a "haranguer on temperance and a drinker of 'PURE UNADULTERATED LEMONADE.'" 68 By 1833 temperance supporters had established local societies in areas where there was an uneasy balance of American-origin

Plate 2 An image of threatened dispossession and potential conquest by Irish Protestant immigrants. This Orange banner, believed made in Elizabethtown Township in the 18305, is replete with images taken from the Old Testament books of Exodus and Joshua. The biblical images and symbols suggest the sense of deliverance felt by Irish Protestants in the early 18303 in having escaped potential religious and political bondage in the Egypt of emancipated Catholic Ireland to pitch their tents in the Canaan of Upper Canada. A mass influx of Irish Protestants confident of taking over regional society (as symbolized by the seven priests blowing trumpets to bring down the walls of Jericho) gave many earlier-settled Loyalist and Americanorigin inhabitants cause for alarm. Were they suddenly to be shut out of the plum positions and from the leadership of regional society in the same way that the native Irish had been shut out of Derry by the imported apprentice boys supporting William of Orange (the central image on the banner) a couple of centuries earlier? In defence against the politically militant Tory Orange lodges, Americanorigin settlers formed temperance societies to screen admittance to Reform meetings and to gain the moral high ground over the Orangemen holding meetings and carousing in taverns. Source: private collection.

57 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

settlers and Irish immigrants (see Plate i), and closed down some of the taverns within which Orange lodges met. American settlers kept silent about temperance as a screen for their more secret ethno-political agenda. Instead, they emphasized the moral transformation wrought by temperance in previously inebriated communities such as Prescott, where "many, who were on the way to ruin, and whose cases were considered remediless, are restored to their families, their friends and connections, and become useful members to society."69 By extension, they were also restored to the orbit of Reform interests. Bastard Township in Leeds County, where the first Upper Canadian temperance society was founded, offers a microcosm of the ethnic tensions impelling American settlers to embrace temperance. A Baptist colonizer named Abel Stevens settled southern Bastard with ninety Vermont Baptist and Methodist families in the 17905. They were descibed in 1811 as "having settled themselves down in peace expecting never to be disturbed, and as having worn out the best of their days in settling this town."70 Their lack of empathy for the British connection is shown by numerous desertions during the War of 1812, by their unconcern to take the oath of allegiance to the king, and by their reputation for having pro-United States sympathies.71 In the mid-iSzos some three hundred Irish Protestant families were reported to be filling the northern concessions of Bastard Township. The earlier-established American-origin settlers felt threatened by the arriving Irish immigrants, who soon outnumbered them. The Americans' slow acquisition of title to their land over the years contrasted with "the greater part of [the Irish, who] purchased Land from individuals on arrival, and have by their industry assisted with their little capital brought from home, made their entire payments, and are daily receiving their Deeds" within one to two years.72 Faced with the Irish ultra-loyalist vocabulary, and keeping in mind that deserters from their midst during the war had had property confiscated, Americans in Bastard feared that "from their inability to comply with all the provisions of the naturalising laws of this Province, the right of some of them ... to be regarded as British Subjects, is liable to be questioned."73 Fear changed to anger as Bastard Americans met in March 1827 to protest the Alien Bill, which forced them, after thirty years' residence, to swear allegiance in order to become the equals of Irish immigrants just off the boat. One American settler, Joseph K. Hartwell, cannily sized up the implications of the Irish tidal wave. He knew too well the republican inclinations of his older neighbours, and he urged them not to peti-

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tion against the Alien Bill, claiming that those who complained against it were "none but those who ha[ve] abjured allegiance to His Majesty, and whose hearts are wedded to the United States, while they are residents in this country, and who, in case of war, would immediately flee to the land of their birth, and turn the force of their arms against the country in which they had lined their purses: such are not the subjects that should be allowed to inhabit a British colony."74 As if to warrant American fears that Irish immigrants were taking over their community, a church that local American-born Baptists had failed to finish building since 1811 was sold in 1827 to Irish Anglicans, who promptly completed construction in time for an Orange chaplain to address two hundred Orangemen crowded into the church on 12 July 1829.75 Joseph Hartwell's "determined ... welcoming of Emigrants from Ireland to this part of the Country and assisting them to get to their friends and acquaintances without allowing their being detained on the way" only heightened the feelings of jealousy and paranoia that Americans in Bastard entertained towards their new Irish immigrant neighbours. The "unwelcome and unkind reception the Irish Emigrants settling in Bastard met with ... from some of the old American Inhabitants being unnecessarily alarmed" threatened "to produce serious consequences."76 By early 1829 ethnic sparring in Bastard was so serious "that great inconvenience is daily felt by the Inhabitants ... for the want of Magistrates."77 The Irish immigrants of Bastard were organized into three Orange lodges,78 with their settlement provocatively named New Boyne, to suggest their militant hope of dominating the American inhabitants in the same way that they had dominated the native inhabitants of Ireland following the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Tension mounted as local Americans began to support William Lyon Mackenzie, and it came to a head when Orangemen fortified with liquor clubbed Reform electors at the Bastard poll in 1834, whereupon there followed a brutal riot at a nearby tavern in which an American-origin inhabitant was killed.79 In June 1828 American-born doctor Peter Schofield organized the first temperance society and delivered in Bastard the first temperance address in Upper Canada. Coming as he did from a prominent local family, Schofield was concerned to arouse fellow Americanorigin residents to the need to keep abreast if not ahead of the new Irish arrivals. With the Irish already taking over the local church and claiming the right to be appointed to plum government positions in society because of their more impressive credentials as loyal subjects, Schofield and others were alarmed that the traditional heavydrinking habits of the American-origin settlers could be pointed to

Plate 3 Distribution of Conservative and Reform electors in Bastard Township during the 1844 election. Bastard was one of the earliest townships in Upper Canada to be numerically balanced between Irish Protestants who arrived in the late 18208 and American settlers who had been established as a group settlement since the 17905. Initial fears among local American inhabitants that they would be swamped by the flood of Irish immigrants settling beside them prompted the formation of the first temperance society in Upper Canada at Bastard in 1828. Source: H.F. Walling, Map of the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville, 1861-62; and Brockville Recorder, 28 Nov. 1844, i.

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by Irish aspirants to office as a pretext for their not being appointed. Schofield, therefore, in his temperance addresses attempted to frighten people into joining his society by citing horrific examples of "habitual drinkers of ardent spirits ... brought to their end by what is called 'spontaneous combustion.'" By this he meant that a heavy drinker "takes on fire, as by an electric shock, and burns up without any external application." Schofield cited the case of a young man about twenty-five years old; he had been an habitual drinker for many years. I saw him about nine o'clock in the evening on which it happened; he was then, as usual, not drunk, but full of liquor. About eleven, the same evening, I was called to see him. I found him literally roasted, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet... standing erect in the midst of a widely extended, silver coloured blaze, bearing ... exactly the appearance of the wick of a burning candle in the midst of its own flame.80

Faced with Irish Protestants organized in Orange lodges, Schofield's temperance society desperately attempted to rally Americanorigin inhabitants of Bastard through a cause the Irish would scorn to join, to reduce the heavy liquor consumption that increased tensions between Irish and American settlers. It would introduce an elevating influence that would prevent Americans in positions of authority from being replaced by high officials bending to Irish calls for a "purification of the magistracy." When another local Americanorigin doctor, George Breakenridge, fraternized with the Irish in local taverns, Schofield as president "of a numerous and respectable Temperance Society" took pains to quash his ambitions to become a magistrate.81 In his 1828 temperance address Schofield linked heavy liquor consumption to British immigrants in remarks about a nearby district predominantly filled with Irish and Scottish immigrants: "I have been credibly informed that the coroner of the District of Bathurst has held about twenty inquests over dead bodies, and that every one, without exception, had been produced by ardent spirits."82 Liquor consumption and production among American settlers in Bastard Township consequently declined so abruptly that the number of taverns in the township dropped from eight to three by 1834.83 Increasingly, barn-raisings and logging bees held by Americans in Bastard were conducted without liquor. The number of temperance lodges that hastily multiplied between 1828 and 1831 (see Plate i) roughly equalled the number of Orange lodges that sprang up during the same years. Where the pattern of early Orange lodges reflected Irish Protestant settlement, the lo-

61 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

cations of early temperance societies did not follow concentrations of American settlement. Rather, they tended to be established in communities where there was an older American-origin settlement uneasily balanced with or besieged by a large adjacent Irish Protestant settlement. Similarly, lodges of the Independent Order of Good Templars, a temperance organization for men and women that spread from New York State across Upper Canada in the 18505, at first were concentrated in areas where Loyalist and American settlers lived side by side with Irish immigrants. By the i86os IOGT lodges were beginning to be established in predominantly Irish immigrant communities as well, as all memory of the link between American-origin Reformers and temperance began to disappear.84 Highland Scottish settlements such as Glengarry and southern Lanark County, conservative and suspicious of rapid change, manifested no interest in temperance, as shown by the boast of the Bathurst Independent Examiner in 1829 that "it has not been found necessary to establish, either here or in any part of the Perth settlement, that disgrace to humanity and certain mark of former debasement a temperance society."85 From the mid-i83os on, Malcolm Cameron, the mercurial Reform member for Lanark County, zealously advocated and gained support for temperance in the pro-Reform lowland settlements of northern Lanark County where he grew up, following the example of American-origin Reformers in Leeds and Grenville to the south. The ethnic and political division of Lanark County over temperance is readily apparent from the attendance at meetings of the Bathurst District Temperance Society in 1836. In lowland Scottish settlements such as Carleton Place, Ramsay, and Lanark townships there were large memberships of 511, 295, and 187 persons respectively. In equally populous Irish Protestant settlements in the same county, membership was sparse, with only 57 members at Richmond and but 18 in southern Beckwith Township.86 Temperance was recognized more as an ethno-political than a moral movement in Lanark County. When a Reformer at Perth suggested as late as 1846 that the Saint Andrew's Day dinner of Highlanders in Beckwith Township was connected with a temperance festival, a Highlander retorted that temperance was not even mentioned, as "it would have been looked upon as an insult."87 Temperance meetings were notorious for being occasions "where people guzz[l]es tea ... and slander their neighbours."88 Another Highlander responded to a neighbour who was urging the cause of total abstinence, saying, "Now I am afraid that there is a great deal of doublefaced dealing in your society and this is one of the worst faults I have to [raise against] it: I have seen numbers of your society drinking grog when

62 Drink in Canada

none of their fellow brethren were in their company and still they were considered true members."89 It was the establishment of the Grand Orange Lodge of British America at Brockville in January 1830 that galvanized Americanorigin settlers and Scottish lowlander radicals to found organizations and to advocate temperance in a region where previously there had been no evidence of a collective sense90 and where heavy drinking had been the rule. American-origin doctors belonging to the Johnstown Medical Society at Brockville stipulated in their February 1830 constitution that "the Society shall consist of such medical gentlemen only as are temperate in their habits."91 The first article of the Brockville Temperance Society constitution in March 1830 stated, "The object of this Society is, to restrain the use of Ardent Spirits to cases in which the use of them may be strictly Medicinal."92 The Grand Jury of the Johnstown District Court of Quarter-Sessions, composed wholly of prominent American-origin inhabitants, in May 1830 forbade ardent spirits in the jury room.93 Although the stated concern of these three groups was to control drinking, what is significant is the timing of this new rhetoric, all within a few months of the establishment of the Orange lodges as the impenetrable organizational nucleus of local Conservatism. The fear underlying the new emphasis on temperance at exactly the same time Irish immigrants were being welded together in a chain of Orange lodges was revealed in a much-copied editorial in 1830. It argued that Orangeism was "poisonous to the peace of society," not only because violent Irish Protestants comprised the membership of the lodges but also because impressionable sons of Loyalists and American settlers risked being recruited: The parents and elder relatives of giddy and heedless youth should be careful to prevent their becoming members of any institutions which are likely to stir up strife in the Colony ... Orangeism can serve no other purpose than to stir up the evil passions of one class of His Majesty's subjects against another, and to perpetuate the heartburnings and animosities which have made Ireland one of the most miserable countries on earth, and which if suffered to reign here, Upper Canada will become proverbial for its wilderness aspect, and the savageness and ferocity of its scanty population [emphasis added].94

To think that Irish Protestants might assimilate the sons of Loyalists and other American-origin settlers to their way of thinking, luring them with the secret rituals and associated heavy drinking of

63 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

Orangeism, gave moral urgency to the temperance cause in the early 18305. Rather than continue on in the alcoholic stupor that had been a normal part of colonial life before 1830, there was suddenly a new emphasis on morality and enlightenment to prevent any risk that American youths might be gulled by Orange rhetoric and meetings in taverns. The rapid spread of temperance in the early 18303 promoted an ethno-moral division in society, with drinking Orange Irish immigrants forming the preponderant group on one side and pro-temperance American-origin settlers and lowland Scottish immigrants the main body on the other. By 1845 the Johnstown Agricultural Society held liquor-free banquets.95 Temperance inns and hotels sprang up (see Plate 4), offering to attend with proper care and respect to a "sober, generous, and enlightened public."96 All workers at Temperance Mills in Yonge Township were abstainers.97 At an 1836 temperance wedding in Bathurst Township "no liquor stronger than tea was served."98 In 1843 the pro-Reform Bathurst Courier recommended that schools not hire "the ignorant and intemperate."99 It was feared that the youth of American and Scottish lowland settlers would become delinquent - that is, would come under the influence of politically biased teachers, given the burgeoning Irish population. Any hopes that local Orange Tories would not realize that the temperance lodges were being used as a cover for Reform organizing were short-lived. Temperance soon was viewed by Irish Protestant Tories as politically and morally suspect. An Irish Anglican clergyman at Brockville argued against temperance societies as secular institutions that threatened to replace the Christian Church "for instructing men in the morality that is acceptable in God's sight," offering as proof the fact that "the Temperance Reform has flourished most in ... New England ... among the descendants of the Puritans, in that region of the country which is well known to be the head quarters of American Unitarianism, Universalism, and Atheism."100 Most Irish immigrant clergy agreed, linking atheistic and American republicanizing tendencies with the temperance movement. Irish Methodists in Lanark County refused to allow their chapels to be used for temperance meetings,101 in contrast with American-origin Methodists in Leeds and Grenville, who zealously promoted temperance. Letters to the Bathurst Courier argued that Christians ought not to co-operate with enemies of their faith in promoting temperance because it threatened to supplant Christianity.102

Plate 4

A woodcut advertisement for the Howard Temperance House of John Campbell at Perth in 1852. Temperance hotels provided a separate place of meeting for temperance societies, and, because of the lack of liquor, Orange societies scorned to patronize them. The name of this temperance hotel was a tribute to Matthew Munsell Howard, the Reform member for Leeds County who was defeated in the early 18303 by drinking Orangemen who beat electors at the poll located in Bastard Township. Source: National Library of Canada NL-i6i/4.

65 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

Throughout eastern Upper Canada the division of regional society over temperance closely reflected the ethnic pattern of settlement by mid-century. In Gananoque, where many people were of American origin, the success of temperance was so overwhelming that by 1852 the town's three temperance societies had "hardly left a Drunkard or drinking man in this region."103 In Augusta Township Americanorigin temperance supporters in the southern concessions near Prescott contrasted with the Irish to the north, whom an 1852 census enumerator found "much addicted to Intemperance."104 Similarly, the American population along the Rideau River in Montague Township supported two temperance societies, while Irish Protestants in the back concessions supported four Orange lodges.105 In contrast with the intolerant references to Catholicism by Orangemen, for which they were taken to task by Reform editors, the articulated temperance goal of effecting a moral reformation was beyond reproach by the Tory press. This instant moral legitimacy contrasted with continuous questioning of whether Orangeism should be allowed to exist at all as a secret society and hold public processions. An 1843 bill of the Reform legislature outlawing secret societies threatened to revoke the licence of all those permitting a secret society to hold meetings in their inns - an obvious reference to Orangeism.lo6 With the Orange bogey seemingly taken care of, the temperance movement in some localities went into decline in the mid-i84os. Temperance societies were not considered secret societies, since they gave the appearance of being open to the general public. Orange lodges purported to recruit members of the general public, excluding Roman Catholics, but Orange minutes and rituals were kept secret from the general public, and minutes of the higher blue, purple, and black degrees were kept secret even from the general Orange membership, to screen carefully those who advanced upwards. Although temperance lodges with rituals and regalia did not appear until the 18405, early societies subtly and effectively filtered the membership to ensure that Irish Tories unfriendly to Reform, if they infiltrated, did not advance upwards. Temperance society meetings essentially brought together "fit and proper persons" to promote the spread of abstinence principles. Members were accepted after pledging to "entirely abstain from the use of Ardent Spirits, except as an article of Medicine. We will not furnish them to our friends as an article of entertainment; nor to persons in our employ, as an article of refreshment; and in all suitable and proper ways we will discountenance their use in the community."107 Any member accused of violating this pledge might "at any regular

66 Drink in Canada

meeting be expelled by a majority of two thirds of the members present, and the cause of his expulsion [be] entered on the record of the Society." The rumours, investigations, revelations, exposures, confessions, and repentance, the votes on expulsion engendered by the pledges, the investigating committees, and the consequences of violating abstinence pledges all made temperance societies inquisitional. They therefore offered American-origin members a means of effectively excluding Irish Tory immigrants without being accused of being a secret society. How its avowedly moral purpose effectively placed the temperance movement above criticism and permitted it to acquire undue political influence was apparent to an anonymous American moralist in 1836. He deplored "that, for the accomplishment of its objects, high pressure forces of the nature of compulsion have been contrived and employed in ways and to an amount not very approvable ... From a purely benevolent institution, based upon humane motives, or the higher aims of religion, as the case may be, the association is gradually converted into an engine of power, and the policy henceforth is to retain and augment these advantages, under the appearance of pursuing the original purpose."108 Only rarely did the anti-Irish rhetoric of temperance enthusiasts stray into the public press. One temperance lecturer, in the course of a lengthy address at Smith's Falls, regaled his audience with an account of a dream he had had on the bank of the Rideau Canal locks at that village. In the dream his "disturbed and distorted imagination peopled the River with unfortunate and unhappy specimens of humanity, who were emigrating ... in search of employment" aboard barges. For the lecturer the positive image in his dream was a group of "officers and other leading members of a benevolent Society" standing around the "superb and substantial pair of Locks, ... directing the Lockmen to keep the vessels back, and put the passengers through the Locks; for they were anxious to wash away the dirt and disease that infested many of these poor travellers." This meant boarding the barges, "and notwithstanding the threats, tears, prayers, and pleadings of the terrified passengers," the lockmen "hauled and pulled, and jerked and shoved, and drove the lock full of men and women"; they then filled the locks with water to soak and wash them until they were sufficiently cleansed to be pulled into the next lock, where they were allowed to board a magnificent "TEMPERANCE SHIP," where they "were neatly clad and songs of deliverance burst from their lips." If the largely American-origin audience chortled at the image of dirty immigrants bobbing about in

67 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

the locks of water, "smarting, choaking, coughing, strangling, and vomitting," it did so nervously, because it was their own drinking habits that had been greatly altered as they became a minority among the hordes of Irish immigrants pouring in on every side.109 What would they do should large numbers of Irish immigrants decide to board the temperance ship? The finishing stroke for the early temperance movement as a cover for Reform organizing, ironically, was its altruistic message. It could not help attracting some British immigrants to its ranks, and ultimately it affected even Orangeism. In a kind of reverse transformation of the loyal Protestant cause into a Catholic nationalist mass crusade, as documented by Elizabeth Malcolm in Ireland, many Irish immigrants in Upper Canada were attracted by the moral goals of the temperance movement, unaware of its strong links to political Reform. The new equation of temperance with morality led Orangemen at Richmond to boast of holding a procession in 1839 "without drunkness, riot, or ought else unseemly."110 In 1843 Orange Grand Master Ogle Gowan counselled lodges "to degrade not your characters, and to waste not your funds, in Taverns."111 By the early i86os there were Orange (see Plate 5) and British-immigrant-based temperance lodges such as the British American Order of Good Templars being formed. Still, minutes from a rural lodge in Montague Township during the 18505 and i86os show that repeated attempts by a few Orangemen to eliminate liquor from meetings and to prevent drunkenness during processions were to no avail; beverages at meetings and decreasing fines for drunkenness reflected the continuing easy tolerance of liquor by most Orange Irish immigrants.112 Temperance was not their cause, although some Orangemen were beginning to feel the pressure of not being sober members of society within a new moral atmosphere created by the temperance movement. The winning over of some Irish Protestants to the stated altruistic objectives of the movement promised to reduce drunkenness among them and to reduce as well any repetition of the election violence the Irish perpetrated in the 18305. Any Irish Tories perceived to be infiltrating the inner ranks of the movement could be expelled by a majority of the membership in each temperance society. The early temperance movement in eastern Upper Canada rapidly emerged and was strongly promoted by American and lowland Scottish Reformers who feared that the political, social, and moral values of Irish immigrants threatened to overwhelm them. Temperance provided them with a new focus behind which they cloaked their political organizing in the face of an emerging Irish Protestant polity. It also provided them with a renewed sense of moral legiti-

Plate 5 A certificate of membership for the Reverend John May in Victoria Temperance Loyal Orange Lodge at Kingston in 1861. Even Orangemen, by mid-century, began to feel the pressure of not being sober members of society within a new, avowedly moral atmosphere created by the temperance movement. This document presents the ultimate irony whereby Orange Irish Protestant immigrants, with the symbols of a "chosen people" taking over regional society (compare with Plate 2), avowed the principles of the very organization meant to help curtail their political influence. Source: South March Loyal Orange Lodge, through Bruce S. Elliott.

69 Temperance as Ethnic Subterfuge

macy, and helped them to meet the political challenge presented by Orange lodges, to ensure that Upper Canada was not completely taken over by Irish Tories. The temperance movement appealed to the desire among Reformers for a more progressive society, and it gave nonconformists a new sense of legitimacy at a time when they appeared to be outdistanced by the aggressive church-building programs of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. The ethno-political dynamic behind the temperance movement was so carefully hidden and innocuous as not to be of visible concern to arriving Irish immigrants in Leeds, Grenville, and Lanark counties. It represented no overt threat to their emerging numerical dominance. The major achievement of the temperance counter-challenge was to lull its pro-Reform promoters into believing that they were as morally viable as the Irish and that consequently they as a part of regional society might maintain their ground in Upper Canada.

4 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart": The Drinking Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Canada CHERYL KRASNICK WARSH

A cup of wine is good for a woman; Two are degrading; Three induce her to act like an immoral woman; And four cause her to lose all self-respect and sense of shame. Talmud1

During the late nineteenth century the temperance movement was a popular channel for the feminist energies of middle-class, evangelical English Canadian women. The respectable maternal feminists who strove to sweep away vice, pauperism, disease, and alien cultures with the broom of community agitation were also engaging in a critique of a male subculture that perpetuated itself in institutions like the saloon and the brothel.2 In the latter case the feminists found common ground with the prostitutes as perceived victims of male exploitation. In the former instance, however, women (other than prostitutes) who frequented drinking establishments were not so easily accommodated. The ideology of True Womanhood, which provided the justification for female reform activities, ascribed an inherent superiority to middle-class women based upon the characteristics of purity, piety, and submissiveness - characteristics that were incompatible with the drinking woman.3 Yet the cult of True Womanhood was a construct of the 18305 and 18405. By the late nineteenth century many of this older generation of female reformers found, to their consternation, that drinking among women, of both their own and the lower classes, apparently was on the increase, or at least was more public. The entry of single

71 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart"

women into the paid work-force in the cities, beyond the guidance and control of their parents, produced a target for the generalized anxieties of the pious middle class, who feared the moral consequence of rapid social change. Recreational activities in which working women were engaged, such as dancing and skating, were the focus of a conservative backlash that tarred all amusements with the brush of sexual immorality. The upholders of public virtue worked to close the dance-halls, enforce curfews, and support alternative and respectable entertainments such as the YWCAS and organized sports.4 The conservative forces were aided in these drives by members of the medical profession, who in the late nineteenth century developed biological models describing the evils attendant upon the social transformations accompanying urban industrialization. Physicians were particularly concerned about changes in the status of women. "The Victorian medical model," Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes, "with Manichean determination, projected a bitter war between the mind and the body, especially between woman's mind and body. Binary opposites, mind and body, men and women, could not be fused. The surety of social order and cohesion rested upon their biological opposition ... Such laws robbed change of its legitimacy - if not of its power."5 Nowhere was the "unnatural" aspect of social change more apparent to many physicians than in the prospect of women engaging in the male occupation of public drinking and falling into the male vice of drunkenness. The male drunkard was the brute, the physical aggressor, the wastrel. Women were physically weaker, and not perceived as the primary bread-winners; therefore, these models were inappropriate for them. Since in the Manichean world of late Victorian biology, woman was body, and particularly a vessel for reproduction, the prevalent view of the female alcoholic was expressed in sexual terms. Medical discourse concerning the female alcoholic tended to focus on gender-specific stereotypes: the fallen woman and the bad mother, who together represented the ultimate forms of female degradation. These stereotypes were especially compelling because, like the ideology of separate spheres itself, they crossed class lines. The factory worker and the shop clerk, the slum mother and the society matron could all, through the weakness of will and the snare of alcohol, be thrown into the abyss of degradation. Beverage alcohol had held a venerable role in the household, as a tonic and a medicine, but through the parallel efforts of medical direction and temperance agitation, homemakers in increasing numbers were

72 Drink in Canada

weaned from wines, beers, and spirits. This process took place over decades, but its effects have been lasting. In its many forms, liquor was an integral part of women's daily lives for much of the nineteenth century. In an era of unpasteurized milk and uncertain water supply, it was considered a pure and safe beverage. With the increasing availability of alternative beverages, notably tea and coffee, and with the rise of temperance agitation in the 18305 and 18405, alcohol's position as drink of choice diminished; as a medicine, however, it retained its popularity for many succeeding decades. Liquor was believed to stimulate and support the system, prevent fevers and infectious diseases, facilitate breastfeeding, and provide the stamina necessary for hard physical labour.6 Few saw any contradiction in the coexistence of the temperance movement and alcohol-based medications, as is evident in the diary of Catharine Van Norman, a Hamilton, Ontario, homesteader who could in the same entry take approving notice of Sons of Temperance meetings and then exclaim, "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in [my friend's] wounded heart, that she may not grieve herself to death."7 Mrs Van Norman would not have been unusual had she brewed her own cordials. In Summerside, Prince Edward Island, reported John F. Gillis, a local physician, "some of the country people manufactured a kind of liquor from blueberries and spirits, and called it 'shrub' ... They occasionally used it as a medicine."8 More frequently, alcohol-based medicines were administered in the form of tonics or patent medicines, and these were responsible for causing or aggravating cases of alcoholism. Whether from peddlers, "Indian doctors," or grocers, patent medicines treated whatever their consumers suffered from and whatever they were afraid to catch.9 Hood's Sarsaparilla Cures, Paine's Celery Compound, and Dr Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People promised to cure disorders ranging from scrofula to constipation, from night terrors to general weakness. The popular remedies contained from 7 to 50 per cent alcohol by volume, as well as significant amounts of morphine, cocaine, chloral hydrate, and/or bromides.10 The anti-liquor campaigns, which became radically prohibitionist by the 18705 and 18805, did not injure the patent medicine trade, despite the protests of those who perceived the inconsistencies. As the editors of the Maritime Medical News complained in 1903, "The absurdity of a crusade against beer ... and other liquors ... while the free sale of these abominable nostrums is countenanced, is apparent ... Would it not be more profitable and economic [for temperance preachers] 'to take your whisky straight'!"11

73 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart"

While the medical profession decried the lack of controls over the patent medicine trade, practitioners themselves were guilty of introducing many to alcohol dependency. The middle to late decades of the nineteenth century were the heyday of the therapeutic use of alcohol. The perceived stimulating effects of brandies, wine, and whisky were indicated for debilitating disorders and fevers, while clarets and sherries were highly regarded for their aid in digestion. Coming upon the heels of the corrosive therapy of calomel (mercury) dosing, blood-letting, and the overuse of opiates, alcohol-based therapeutics were indeed a mild improvement. But the dangers of iatrogenically produced alcoholism were real, particularly for women, who most commonly frequented physicians for recurring complaints. Liquor therapies were most in vogue during the years when the temperance movement was gaining strength, and many physicians were placed in the embarrassing position of defending their medicines to a public over whom they expected to establish moral superiority as their professional due. They therefore attempted, unsuccessfully, to classify liquor as a dangerous drug, like opium or chloral, over which they should have control.12 The cross messages sent by the medical profession were evident as late as 1880, when the temperance movement was reaching its peak. In that year the Lancet, a stalwart supporter of alcohol in therapeutics, published a series of articles on the medical use of wine by variety and region. The third instalment, for instance, extolled the virtues of red Bordeaux wines.13 Little wonder that the teetotalling lobby spurned efforts on the part of the medical profession to assume any significant role in the crusade. The physicians were aware of the tenuous nature of their position. Back in 1871, Francis Anstie, one of the leading advocates of the medicinal use of alcohol, had been forced to answer charges by temperance writers that his therapy drove many, especially women, to drink. He chose to distance himself and his therapies from the women of "our middle and upper classes," who were "becoming infected ... with the tendency to alcoholic excess; that in not a few instances this goes the length of positive and shameful tippling either habitual or frequent; and that a still larger number of ladies drink, unconsciously, enough liquor to produce a seriously degrading effect upon their mental purity and energy, although they afford no open scandal to the world." Anstie acknowledged the charge that medical practitioners such as himself "aggravated, if not altogether produced ... the tendency to [drink in] excess in educated women ... by the indiscreet prescription ... of stimulants, as a relief from the

74 Drink in Canada

thousand and one petty miseries of body and mind that are the special product, in weak organisms, of the wear and tear of social life, under the high pressure of modern civilization." But he responded that "a notable portion of the apparent increase of secret drinking amongst women is simply increased detection of the habit," which had previously been misdiagnosed as hysteria or some other vague disorder. As far as the culpability of physicians, he argued that "all tipplers become more or less untruthful, but that female tipplers invariably become shameless and most skilful liars."14 Anstie was on thin ice when denying responsibility for inducing many alcohol habits. Physicians adhering to his stimulant therapy recommended "doses equivalent to five shots a day for adults and dosed children with amounts sufficient to cause drunkenness."15 In blaming the victim's mendacity, his rebuttal was not convincing, but his reference to alcoholism among "educated women" is worthy of further comment. Could there have been a basis for the charge of an increase in alcohol abuse among educated women? The pathbreaking activities of the New Women of the 18705 and onwards, whether in colleges, the professions, or missionary work, were fraught with role anxieties, isolation, and stress, all of which could lead to alcoholism. As Smith-Rosenberg has concluded, the college woman "made herself the intellectual peer of young men, and rendered herself socially questionable by that very act. College women were liminal figures ... (drawn) out of their mothers' and grandmothers' domestic mindset."16 By 1900, 11 per cent of Canadian college students were women, yet they remained only a tiny segment of the total population. Entry into higher positions and into the medical societies, law societies, and hospitals was still severely circumscribed.17 A pattern of frustrated ambitions therefore would not be surprising. Dr Hey wood Smith considered "increasing independence" to be a cause of alcoholism,18 while Dr Thomas Crothers believed it to be the cure. "The emancipation of women from the slavery of caste and ignorance," he predicted, "and the steady upward movement in mental and physical development, will prevent any general increase of alcoholism."^ Other medical commentators perceived an increase in women's public drinking, if not alcoholism, which could indicate both freer social mores and greater disposable income. Norman Kerr, president of the British Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety, alleged that "it was no uncommon thing at the present day, in London and other large cities, for young girls and grown-up women to treat each other in a public-house to beer, wine, or spirits ...

75 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart"

Scarcely a Sunday passed that (I) did not, while pursuing (my) professional avocation in London, see a number of women drunk in the streets."20 The two observations, women in pubs and women drunk on the streets, apparently were interchangeable to the medical expert. David Gutzke argues that the shift in female drinking patterns in late Victorian England was the result of the solidifying o class divisions. As evangelical religion spread temperance ideas throughout the United Kingdom, public drinking among women, from the upper classes to the respectable working classes, became more disreputable. But among lower-class women, with few amusements and bad nourishment and living conditions, visits to the pub were still popular. Consequently female drunkenness and poverty increasingly were associated by medical and social commentators.21 By the i88os any public (or private) drinking had become unacceptable for respectable women. Speaking before the Women's Union of the Church of England, reformer Mary Carus Wilson stated, "Unless you have taken pains to inform yourselves on the subject, you can have little idea how the drinking habit, especially secret drinking and drinking at other times than at meals, is increasing amongst our younger sisters ... I have seen [it] myself at restaurants, hotels, railway bars, whilst travelling in trains and staying at country houses."22 Canadian medical journals similarly noted an apparent increase in female alcoholism. The Canada Medical Record quoted Dr Brennan, a Montreal physician and Catholic school commissioner for Quebec, as stating that "in women the habit of tippling was far more prevalent and disastrous than is imagined; within the last four months [I have] seen four women, each the mother of several children and moving in good society, die from the effects of chronic alcoholism."23 Nor was this problem limited to central Canada. William Bayard, one of the leading physicians in Saint John, New Brunswick, supported prohibitory legislation partly on the grounds that "great communities [watch] with grave anxiety the growth of female intemperance on a scale so vast, and at a rate of progression so rapid as to constitute a new reproach and danger."24 Yet these statements were countered by testimony such as that of James Ogilvie, keeper of Hamilton's gaol, taken at the 1890 Ontario royal commission on prisons and reformatories. Ogilvie concluded that "drunkenness among women appears to be decreasing. Sometimes we have had quite a number, but last week we did not have a single sentenced woman in gaol."25 Arrests for drunkenness tended to report only the indigent and working-class drinkers. The medical and reform literature, however, was concerned with the middleand upper-class inebriates. Women of all classes in the province

76 Drink in Canada

experienced virtually identical levels of alcoholism. The Home wood Retreat of Guelph, Ontario, was Canada's largest private asylum and catered to alcoholics among the propertied classes. According to a sample of 567 male and 567 female admissions between 1883 and 1920, 189 men and 35 women were diagnosed with alcoholism.26 Of 224 alcoholics, therefore, 84 per cent were male and 16 per cent were female. Of those sentenced for drunk and disorderly conduct in Ontario between 1881 and 1920, those who were women also averaged to 16 per cent (see Tables i and 2).27 This pattern holds for the city of Ottawa for the period 1893 to 1901, where summary convictions of women for drunkenness averaged 15 per cent of total convictions (see Table 3).28 To add to the consistency, the Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario determined in 1973 that "15.7 percent ... of our estimated 400,000 problem drinkers [were] female."29 If we accept that rates of female alcoholism may indeed have remained fairly consistent throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then it may well have been concern over female drinking habits that was increasing, rather than excessive use of alcohol. As Kay Fillmore concludes in a contemporary context, "It is possible that the exaggerated claims of deviant drinking among women actually reflect a societal reaction to any drinking among women. While light or moderate drinking has been quite normative for men, it may be that light or moderate drinking for women is still to some extent not culturally acceptable."30 By the turn of the century public drinking had vanished as a norm for women. Respectable women felt compelled to conceal their drinking. The middle-class lady "cannot help herself openly to two or three whiskies or brandies, as a man will do."31 Public houses, especially saloons, had been male enclaves. The temperance movement vilified the saloon as a den of iniquity that sent forth drunkards to impoverish, injure, and perhaps murder their families, and drinking establishments of any type were portrayed as the enemies of all women. Women who frequented such places were assumed to be prostitutes or gin-shop derelicts. What options were there for women who wanted or needed the comfort of alcoholic beverages? The solution was to disguise or substitute one's intoxicants. The venerable patent medicine was a common choice. Dr Gillis believed that "the sale of patent medicine [had] increased" in Prince Edward Island since the enactment of prohibitory legislation, "and the large consumption resulted from the alcohol which they contained. Perhaps those who bought patent medicines did not know what they contained, but they sowed the seed and gave the appetite for drink."32

77 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart" Table 1 Drunk and Disorderly Commitments: Ontario Year

Male

Female

Total

% Female

1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1894 1895 1896 1897 1899

3069 2685 2799 3247 3895 3096 2989 3432 3761 4035 3770 2905 2103 1726 1794 1471 1362

726 643 698 648 755 600 566 698 690 742 803 709 633 548 443 436 345

3795 3328 3497 3895 4650 3696 3555 4130 4451 4777 4573 3614 2736 2274 2237 1907 1707

19 19 20 17 16 16 16 17 15.5 15.5 18 20 23 24 19.5 23 20

Source: Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, Annual Reports of the Superintendent of Gaols, Prisons, and Reformatories. Commitment statistics end in 1899 and are missing for the years 1893 and 1898.

While consumers of tonics may have been innocent imbibers, others, particularly habitual drinkers, were more inventive. Dr James Edmunds of New York was "startled and grieved when I hear a lady ... say that she takes a little ether in water two or three times a day instead of wine."33 The Woman's Journal of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), always ready to report on arcane habits, described the following incident: Seeing that the lady made a large purchase of eau de cologne, and wondering if she was going to have a perfumed bath, the reporter asked the welldressed gentleman behind the counter what she wanted it all for. "To get drunk on," was the laconic answer. "To get drunk on?" "Yes, that's what I said. You never heard of cologne drunkards, then? Well, that woman is a cologne drunkard, and one of the worst of them, too. She buys from i to 2 dozen of those long slim bottles of 4711 cologne every week, and she takes it entirely herself ... on lumps of sugar."34

Such extreme measures reflected the desperation of many female alcoholics to hide their affliction. Family members were often

Table 2 Drunk and Disorderly Sentences: Ontario year

Male

Female

Total

% Female

1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1894 1895 1896 1897 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920

2229 1878 1978 2243 2375 2371 2132 2446 2705 2771 2673 1982 1422 1300 1252 1019 989 1071 1300 1530 1500 1789 2108 2177 2201 2652 2712 3031 2932 3446 3971 5409 6152 3945 3682 3098 2120 2911

593 537 507 555 596 490 465 638 566 588 661 564 503 419 333 353 277 334 402 376 397 370 399 404 392 438 410 457 400 402 335 352 390 185 229 108 57 44

2822 2415 2485 2798 2971 2861 2597 3084 3271 3359 3334 2546 1925 1719 1585 1372 1266 1405 1702 1906 1897 2159 2507 2581 2593 3090 3122 3488 3332 3848 4306 5761 6542 4130 3911 3206 2177 2955

21 22 20 20 20 17 18 20 17 17.5 20 22 28 24 21 26 22 24 24 20 21 17 16 16 15 14 13 13 12 10 8 6 6 4 6 3 2.5 1.5

Average % Female

15.98

Source: Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, Annual Reports of the Inspector of Gaols, Prisons and Reformatories. Figures for the years 1893 and 1898 are missing.

Table 3 Drunk and Disorderly Summary Convictions: Ottawa Year

Male

Female

Total

% Female

1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901

199 191 212 174 169 128 172 224 363

13 24 29 39 36 30 39 44 67

212 215 241 213 205 158 211 268 430

6.13 11.2 12.03 18.3 17.6 19 18.5 16.4 15.6

Average % Female 1893-1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917

15

343 401 362

43 53 36

371 630 652 711 664 571 413 271 284 306 349 575

46 62 51 48 60 43 26 22 36 28 27 28

386 454 398

11.4 11.7 9.05

417

11.03 9 7.25 6.3 8.3 7 6 7.5 11.25 8.4 7.2 4.64

MISSING

692 703 759 724 614 439 293 320 334 376 603

8.4

Average % Female 1902-17 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930

244 277 470 401 253 205 195 232 305 310 294 238 253

5 5 9 10 7 3 5 3 1 9 4 5 5

Average % Female 1918-30 Source: City of Toronto Archives, Police Court annual reports.

249 282 479 411 260 208 200 235 306 319 298 243 258

2 1.8 1.9 2.43 2.7 1.4 2.5 1.28 .33 2.8 1.34 2.06 1.94 1.9

80 Drink in Canada

accomplices in maintaining a cloak of secrecy around female alcoholics, who became "skeletons in the households ... Associated with the use of spirits is an increasing dread of exposure and a shrinking from society, and even from relatives and friends," concluded Dr Thomas Crothers, superintendent of the Walnut Lodge Sanitarium of Hartford, Connecticut, which catered to alcoholic patients among the middle and upper classes.35 Norman Kerr, Britain's expert on inebriety, reported the death of a young woman from intemperance; her husband had no "suspicion of the truth, her daughter having been brought up to bring first the wine, and latterly the gin, to her mother in her muff."36 The fear of exposure was a common one. As the manager of a "quiet, unobtrusive private hospital in the neighborhood of Central Park" related to the New York Tribune in 1886, "The patients here are all women ... all wealthy ... and confidentially, this place is nothing more than a high-toned inebriate asylum. It would never do to call it so, and it would ruin the business entirely. It is a peculiar thing about many of our patients ... that if there were anything said about this being a retreat for drunkards, they would never come here. They are sensitive on this point, although they know what is the difficulty with them."37 The perceived decline of moral character was the first and most serious casualty of alcoholism. Since the respectable woman, of necessity, drank in secret, she learned "the art of lying and dissimulation."38 Margaret H., an Ottawa lady from a family with a history of alcoholism, was described by Warren Lyman, her referring physician, as a person "suffering from mental disease" and was admitted to Homewood on the following evidence: "She is addicted to the excessive use of alcohol and other drugs to such an extent as to be untrustworthy and untruthful," and "she becomes stuperous and at times uses obscene language when under the influence of alcohol. In her normal state her language is that of a wellbred lady. "39 The husband of Louise C. was a respectable Toronto businessman, and his letters to Homewood described what particularly exasperated him about his wife's alcoholic behaviour: "I don't believe ... you have ever come across a case like Mrs. C. She has been drinking more or less for over 10 years and lately she has been getting worse and more difficult to manage - We have told her time and time again[,] if she feels these spells coming on[,] to go into her room [and drink] all she wants but to remain there so as to keep it private[,] but no[,] just as soon as she starts drinking[,] downtown she goes and you can't keep her out of public places where she makes a

8i "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart"

show of herself."40 Another Homewood patient, Annie I., a housewife from Peterborough, had first been introduced to stimulants during labour. "For the past 7 years she has been a steady private drunkard, but for about i year she has lost all shame and drank a quart a day."41 Francis C. was admitted by her Hamilton physician, who abetted her denial and misdiagnosed her as neurasthenic. "She has been taking more liquor than is good for her for some time past but is very sensitive regarding acknowledging the same. She goes in ostensibly then for nerve prostration but really to overcome the habit of drinking. You might therefore not allude to that fact."42 Female as well as male medical experts had many theories regarding the reasons for excessive drinking among women, which ranged from the physical to the psychological. The "painful performance o her special function" - that is, the pain associated with menstruation and childbirth - was cited as a cause for alcohol abuse. To seek relief, "rum in some form is used ... With a result... of inducing a recurring condition of rise and fall as regards well being until the interim is finally bridged, and a state of more or less steady inebriety ensues," wrote Dr Agnes Sparks of Brooklyn in 1897. "Lack of nutrition and the wear and worry of domestic life and social demands" also produced "an exhaustion for which relief is mistakenly sought in the transient aid of alcohol."43 Medical discourse on and subsequent treatment of menstruation may itself have contributed to alcohol and other substance abuse. Victorian physicians argued that "menstruation made women weak, diseased and dependent"44 and therefore worthy of medical intervention. While brandy traditionally had been a home remedy for menstrual pain, the prescriptions of physicians may have given women access to more potent remedies. The material bases for alcoholism among women were also accompanied by what female drinking represented in symbolic terms. Intemperance was a problem of all classes. Yet it was associated with filth, disease, immorality, and ignorance - all stereotypical of the "dangerous" lower classes. It was also associated with men; consequently, the woman drunkard was a particularly degraded creature. As stated above, the proscription against female drunkenness was based upon two archetypes: the bad mother and the fallen woman. For many late nineteenth-century reformers, "a child's need for firm but loving family care, the central importance of [the] mother in ensuring [the child] received it, and her concern that [her child's] tender, plant-like nature not be menaced in an inappropriate environment" were the foundations of a healthy and productive society.45

82 Drink in Canada

Advocates of temperance placed emphasis upon the maternal role. In 1891 Annie Parker, an executive member of the Dominion WCTU, likened the family and home to a "miniature state, a matriarchy ordered by God," wherein maternal drinking thus became a profanity that inflicted physical, moral, and genetic hardship upon the innocents.46 On a practical level, the unremitting demands of child-rearing rendered even an occasional binge far more serious for women than for men. Dr Smith noted: When a man comes home drunk he comes as a terror to his children [and his wife] ... But when a woman drinks [worse yet, when she is imprisoned for drunkenness], the family is deprived of the mainstay. The husband is left without anyone to care for him or provide his food, the children are left to run about uncared for and exposed to all sorts of dangers, and on her coming out of prison her drinking habits are as bad as ever, and the house has ultimately gone to wrack and ruin.47

Social workers described scene after scene of child neglect due to alcohol. "Drunkenness among the women is ten times worse than in men," stated J.J. Kelso, Ontario's superintendent of neglected and dependent children. "It causes them to lose their maternal instinct and feeling, and they become thoroughly degraded."48 In testimony before the Dominion Royal Commission on the Effects of the Liquor Traffic of 1895, Kelso charged: "I have known mothers who, when they were sober, really idolized their children, but when they got drunk they would lock them out in the street all night, or would send them out to beg and encourage them to steal ... I have known them to take the clothes off their children's backs and sell them at a pawn shop; but when these mothers were sober they would not dream of doing such things."49 William C. Adams, a Toronto dentist testifying before the commission, recounted a tragedy from his boyhood: I knew a family in the neighbourhood who were in the habit of drinking occasionally ... The man went to Oakville to sell some produce [and brought home a jug of whisky]. After the children were gone to bed [he and his wife] went to work to drink it. One would take a teacupful, and then the other. Finally, they quarrelled over the last, and the husband struck or pushed his wife, and she fell backwards on a bed, too insensible to realize that she had fallen on top of her little infant lying in the bed, and lay there until she smothered the child to death. Some of the neighbours thought this was murder, and that something should be done about it, and it made a great sensation in the neighbourhood.50

83 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart"

While Adams, over the course of a lifetime, must have known of many instances of domestic violence caused by alcohol abuse, it was the unnatural act of a mother smothering her child over a drink that had been etched in his memory. It was not simply the lower-class and most "immoral" women who ruined their children through consumption of alcohol. It was believed that misguided notions among lay people and physicians alike could cause permanent physiological damage to be inflicted upon infants both pre- and post-natally. Dr Lena Beach, assistant physician at the Iowa State Hospital for the Insane, decried the "prevailing belief among women that during the period of pregnancy, anything which the individual craves should be supplied and some women resort to stimulants at this time who would not do so at any other."51 "A drunken motherhood mean[t] children handicapped physically, mentally and morally. The problem of infant mortality includes also the problem of drink," added Elizabeth Chesser, a British physician. "The woman who takes alcohol ... when she is pregnant, is imperilling her unborn child. If a woman ruins her constitution with alcohol, how can she bear healthy children? How can she nurse them? And what chance have they of surviving the first few months of infant life?"52 Particularly pernicious was the conviction widespread among the "ignorant nurses," mothers, and lady friends that a "little stout 2 or 3 times a day" was a useful tonic during nursing.53 The consequence of this practice, as Dr James Edmunds baldly put it, was that "the babies of the present generation are never sober from the earliest period of their existence until they have been weaned ... The soothed condition of the baby after the mother has taken half a pint of beer is really the first stage of drunkenness in that child. When I hear a mother telling me that whenever she takes a little whisky and water or brandy and water because the child is fractious, and she finds that her milk agrees with it better, I am obliged to ask her if she know what she is doing?"54 The high infant mortality rate of cities like Montreal was blamed by some physicians and temperance advocates not primarily on the city's diseased living conditions, contaminated milk, and polluted water but on drinking among nursing women. In 1899 the Canada Lancet reported that drunkenness among women in Canada, although "much less than in Europe," still had "a very prejudicial effect on infant life. Sanitary improvements ... have done little to limit the death rate of infants, and there is a wide field of labour lying before those whose desire it is to raise the condition of the poor."55 Shiftless, lazy mothers were to blame. "The 18,000 children

84 Drink in Canada

who died last year in the Dominion, under i year, cost a great deal during their short existence, and to alcohol from the breasts of their mothers, or administered in medicines, much of the loss must be attributed," charged temperance writer Thomas Brown in 1884.56 Despite their warnings, physicians were still guilty of offering contradictory advice to women. Dr Abraham Jacobi, one of New York's leading public-health physicians, gave the following "excellent" rules for nursing babies, as reported in the Canadian Medical and Surgical Journal: "In hot weather - but in the hottest days only - mix a few drops of whiskey with either water or food, the whiskey not to exceed a teaspoonful in 24 hours."57 That this prescription was to be followed in hot weather indicated that the whisky was to act as a prophylactic against dysenteries, diarrheas, and other deadly diseases of infancy that multiplied during the summer months. It was understandable, then, that mothers might well have been loath to part with liquor's protective qualities in the face of temperance opposition. Parents who scrupulously kept their children away from intoxicants could none the less be endangering their offspring and their race by continuing to drink themselves. The degeneration theories of Cesare Lombroso and August Morel posited that drunkenness in one generation would produce idiocy, insanity, and criminality in future generations.58 "Depravity is stamped, like the mark of Cain, upon the foreheads of the posterity of drunken parents, especially when the mother has been a victim to the habit, or has been in the habit of using alcoholics."59 Degeneracy could also manifest itself in offspring through a love of liquor or other deficiencies. Dr Alexander Reid, superintendent of the asylum for the insane in Nova Scotia, stated that "we have quite an amount of predisposition to nervous affections as the result of strong drink."60 What was to be done to protect the race from alcoholic degeneration? Proper education was a moderate solution. "Given a parent who is a dipsomaniac," argued Dr Phyllis Chesser, "the chances of a daughter escaping are reduced considerably if nobody realizes the importance of telling the girl of her danger."61 Unfortunately, like the opium addict, whose reproductive cycle was "suspended," the "average female alcoholist is not sterile," warned Dr Agnes Sparks. "It is one of the mysteries of a divine economy that this beneficent law [of sterility in opium addicts] does not extend [to] her alcoholic sister, and so shut off ... a diseased, depraved progeny that tends to curse every community with a physical and moral blight." For Sparks the solution was terrible but clear: "Granting the woman has been given

85 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart"

treatment ... without avail, she should be asexualized. This, whether maid or matron ... It might be curative, it surely would be preventive; and better by far unsex the woman than have her beget a brood tainted with this curse of the world."62 The other stereotype associated with female drunkenness was the belief that its victims tended to be prostitutes, although there was much debate over which was cause and which effect. Norman Kerr had no difficulty in assigning blame. "Vitiation and obliteration of every moral sense," he wrote of the female alcoholic, "rapidly succeeded to the loss of truthfulness, and thus chastity ... was endangered and often lost ... All who had studied 'the social evil' knew that ... drink was a leading cause of prostitution ... Alcohol excited the animal passions, while it lessened the moral control."63 Florence Kinton, of Toronto's Salvation Army, agreed that prostitution was closely connected with alcoholism, but for economic, not moral reasons. "If a woman craves drink, she must have money."64 Kinton's fellow soldier, Agnes Cowan, stated that of an annual population of 86 in the Army's Toronto rescue home for fallen women, 30 inmates drank. Of the other 56, 20 were in situations that could be indirectly traced to intemperance: "Their parents were addicted to drink, and they were thrown on the world."65 At the Andrew Mercer Reformatory, the Ontario penitentiary for women, very few of those committed between 1881 and 1917 for drunkenness were also convicted of prostitution (see Table 4). But when drinking habits of the inmates were tabulated (and these were among the few personal characteristics deemed of sufficient importance to be recorded), over one-half (56.5 per cent) were noted to be intemperate (see Table 5). A direct line between liquor and prostitution could not be clearly drawn, but the pair indicated complete degradation. Staff Inspector David Archibald of the Toronto police force's morality branch argued that prostitution and drunkenness did not go hand in hand: "My experience is that drunkenness is the result of prostitution ... Those who are found in houses of ill-fame have [as a rule] never touched liquor until after their fall ... They gradually become demoralized until at last they fall into drunkenness and the lowest forms of street walking."66 The alcoholic, then, was perceived to be the most degraded of women, morally, socially, and physiologically. Thomas Doner, author of Eleven Years a Drunkard, a temperance tract, once had been held in a cell next to a group of drunken women: "Hopeless indeed seems the condition of fallen women. Men can reform; society welcomes them back to the path of virtue ... But, alas, for poor women

Table 4 Drunkenness Convictions, Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women Year 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916

Drunkenness

7 34 31 24 15 19 8 10 9 7 2 7 11 9 9 6 9 23 15 32 34 54 41 42 31 29 16 14 16 18 29 17 15 5 4

D& Disorderly*

_ 12 5 2 5 3 5 2 11 8 5 6 14 1 2 2 1 2 2 4 7 3 1 5 4 1 2 -

D& Vagrancy**

D& Prostitution

_

_

11 1 5 1 5 1 2 3 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 -

3 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 -

Total

7 46 50 29 27 24 18 14 21 17 7 16 14 13 10 12 11 11 26 17 36 41 58 43 48 36 31 17 15 17 19 30 18 18 5 4

Source: Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, Annual Reports of the Inspector of Prisons, Reformatories and Gaols. There was no report for 1892. * Includes bad language, causing a disturbance on street, larceny. ** Includes drunk, disorderly, and vagrancy.

Table 5 Drinking Habits of Inmates, Andrew Mercer Reformatory Year

Total

% Intemperate

1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916

30 221 212 117 156 142 123 142 158 124 101 117 100 122 98 103 97 104 111 119 130 121 111 116 105 114 109 106 103 131 128 132 163 162 133 123

67 72 36 81 72 66 63 56 56 59 55 57 48 57 54 50 45 44 57 51 55 61 77 61 74 64 60 57 47 43.5 59 51 51.5 45 45 37

Average

56.5

Source: Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, Annual Reports of the Inspector of Prisons, Reformatories, and Gaols. There was no report in 1892.

88 Drink in Canada

who have been tempted to sin by rum, for them there are no calls to come home, no sheltering arm, no acceptance of confessions and promises to amend."67 Why was this so? The alcoholic woman had fallen far from her pedestal; the nineteenth-century cult of True Womanhood, which provided the ideological justification for middle-class women's reform activities, burdened all women with the task of setting "the moral boundaries of society. The female deviant - prostitute, vagrant, murderess, or thief - threatened social order doubly, both by sinning and by removing the moral constraints on men ... Having been born pure, [female deviants] had fallen further than their male counterparts."68 "Every holy instinct and every womanly shame have been thus destroyed," declared temperance lecturer John B. Gough in 1887.69 Toronto columnist Faith Fenton concurred: "Drunken women ... Together [these words] portray the saddest, the most degraded sight the whole earth can afford ... We would that ... an appellative so darkly suggestive should never again be associated with the last and most perfect of God's creations."70 To the reformers and the physicians who treated inebriates, the alcoholic woman was cunning, manipulative, and an inveterate liar. These were characteristics in direct opposition to the late Victorian precepts of feminine honour, veracity, and moral rectitude. When poverty was coupled with drunkenness, this was synonymous with degradation to many middle-class minds. Consider the misogynist tirade of R. Welsh Branthwaite, inspector of retreats, in his report under the British Inebriate Act of 1907. With respect to confirmed female drunkards, he wrote, "It has become necessary to set apart some of our institutions as little better than moral refuse heaps, for the detention of the hopelessly defective."71 Branthwaite discussed at length the unwomanliness of drunken behaviour: "The mad [alcoholic] fit while it lasts is not pleasant to witness - utter abandonment to passion, wanton destruction of anything handy ... absence of all sense of decency, and use of the vilest possible language are some of its chief characteristics." At the heart of Branthwaite's distaste was the dearth of feminine physical qualities: "Most common in women is the heavy, repulsive, masculine type, with a tendency to violence and brutality, beady eyes, square jaws, and dull, flabby expressionless face."72 That deviance in behaviour paralleled deviance in gender found full expression in Cesare Lombroso's influential study The Female Offender.Through his detailed measurements of skull sizes, distances between eyes and ears, and abundance of hair, Lombroso

89 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart"

created an archetype of the criminal half-woman that has found resonance in criminology ever since. The criminal women were "singularly virile ... having the bodies of women, but all the air of brutal men, whom they resemble sometimes, even in their dress." The prostitute's coarse voice, which other observers attributed to "habits of drinking wine and shrieking," was actually, according to Lombroso, the result of a "masculine larynx." Child neglect, commonly associated with drunkenness, "becomes comprehensible when we reflect... upon the union of masculine qualities which prevent the female criminal from being more than half a woman, [and] upon that love of dissipation in her which is necessarily antagonistic to the constant sacrifices of a mother." The cult of True Womanhood echoed in Lombrosian anthropology: "Her normal sister is kept in the paths of virtue by many causes, such as maternity, piety, weakness, and when these counter influences fail, and a woman commits a crime, we may conclude that her wickedness must have been enormous before it could triumph over so many obstacles." The criminal woman, Lombroso concluded, was "a monster."73 The repulsion felt and expressed towards female drunkenness at the turn of the century was related as much to the perceived descent of the drinking woman into a bastardized masculinity as to the association with prostitution. The fixed parameters of gender were crumbling. As Jordanova concludes, "debates about sex and sex roles ... hinged on the ways in which sexual boundaries had become blurred. It was as if the maintenance of the social order depended on clarifying certain key distinctions whose symbolic meanings spread far beyond their explicit context."74 No longer rooted in education, property ownership, occupation, or political participation, masculinity became consumer-oriented. The popularity of sporting events, of military drills, of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and the Boer War, and of Wild West shows in the urban east were manifestations of attempts to allay anxieties arising from social change.75 Medical practitioners were "at the forefront of serious concerns about the feminization of men ... and the masculinization of women, which was believed to result from excessive physical and mental work,"76 and their numbers included the expert on sexuality, Havelock Ellis, who equated feminism with lesbianism. "The modern movement of emancipation ... has involved an increase in female criminality and in feminine insanity, which are being elevated towards the masculine standard," Ellis wrote, adding the taint of lesbianism to the characteristics of promiscuity and neglectful motherhood, in order to demonize even further the "unnatural"

90 Drink in Canada

woman, like the alcoholic, who transgressed sexual boundaries. Ellis operated within and helped to propagate the patriarchal paradigm that equated "natural" laws with female subordination.77 The female drunkard at the fin de siecle was associated with all that was unnatural and unwomanly. The reform rhetoric of virtuous, teetotalling motherhood battling the sinful male saloon was effective in adding the burden of shame to the burden of addiction under which the alcoholic woman suffered. This sense of shame was longlived. Winnie Fraser, a psychiatric nurse, recalled her student days in 1954, when alcoholic women "were brought in unconscious ... They were deliberately misdiagnosed to guard against their discovery ... to protect them." Diane Hobbs, a consultant for the Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario, added that "nurses associate [the female drunk] with promiscuity, personal failure, being a poor wife and mother. We see ourselves in her and we're repulsed."78 The association of female drinking with genetic battery and murder by the proponents of degeneration theory is echoed in contemporary concern over fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). That one drink indeed may be too many is the advice given by researchers to any woman for whom pregnancy is even a possibility. While FAS o course should be avoided at all costs, this emphasis still clouds the much greater incidence of male domestic violence and psychological abuse that often arises from alcoholism. Male drinking patterns, however, except where automobiles are concerned, have largely neither been addressed nor modified in the past few decades.79 As contemporary records testify, the medical discourse on alcohol over the course of the last century contributed to the oppression of the woman drunkard. Degeneration theories ensured that the female alcoholic could never prove herself to be a fit mother. Physical scars were not necessary to show evidence of child neglect or abuse; the scars the child inherited were sufficient. Similarly, the alcoholic woman was assumed to be sexually immoral because she frequented immoral places and her behaviour was often less than respectable. The model of True Womanhood was maintained tenaciously by conservative elements of the medical profession who decried the evolution of women's participation in industrial society; and medical responses to the female alcoholic, and to female drinking in general, reflected this outlook. The association of deviant women and masculinity remains and is reinforced by the sensationalist images of prison movies, in which the criminal population is lesbian, violent, and masculine: the classic Lombrosian criminal type. The legacy of Victorian attitudes towards female alcoholics

91 "Oh, Lord, pour a cordial in her wounded heart"

was that its victims would suffer doubly, from the affliction and from the stigmatization.

5 Inebriate Institutions in North America, 1840-1920 JIM BAUMOHL

The adoption of capitalist values and the spread of evangelical religion heightened concern about alcohol use in the industrializing world after the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The most prominent form of this concern was temperance - that is, movements to eliminate drunkenness, initially by moral suasion but, failing that, by legislative restriction or prohibition. Alongside the temperance movements of many countries developed less successful movements to provide specialized, state-supported treatment for inebriates. Like temperance itself, the idea of treating inebriates in discrete institutions was an American invention. An American doctor, Benjamin Rush, first proposed a "sober house" for drunkards in 1810, and Samuel Woodward, the patriarch of institutional psychiatry in North America and a renowned temperance orator, published in 1835 the first widely read (and widely copied) tract in support of inebriate asylums.1 Originally, the temperance movement was not committed to the principle of total abstinence (it began as an anti-spirits movement), nor was it sympathetic to the plight of drunkards. Temperance sought to confirm the sobriety of the sober, and in this moderate, elite form it spread to Canada and Britain in the late 18205. In the mid-i83os, however, temperance was radicalized by a turn to complete abstinence, or "teetotalism," most significantly by young members of the artisan class who saw in this creed a way to better themselves and redeem their sodden fellows for whom moderation

93 Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920

had failed.2 This shift had dramatic consequences, as Brian Harrison observed about the British movement: Once the temperance movement had adopted the reclaiming of drunkards as its leading objective it had to transform its local structure. Regular meetings alone could keep the drunkard out of the drinking place, [and] provide him with the companionship he had sacrificed ... Only by regular visitation, by "pairing off" with reformed drunkards, and by creating a new framework of life for its members could the teetotal movement secure the ground it gained. Only by putting the reformed drunkard in office, by keeping him in good company, and by encouraging him publicly to announce his changed life could the incentives to sobriety be adequately reinforced. The early teetotal movement pioneered many of the remedies which have since been rediscovered by Alcoholics Anonymous.3

There was much cross-Atlantic fertilization among temperance societies. The environmental therapeutic approach described by Harrison was common in North America as well, and by the late 18303 there were temperance ("dry") coffee houses, reading rooms, hotels, and lodging houses on both sides of the ocean. However, the first therapeutic institution for drunkards was introduced during the Washingtonian movement, which flourished in the United States in the early 18405.4 Arising in a period of economic distress and in the wash of the series of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening, Washingtonian societies attracted sensational public attention through their "experience lecturers," reformed drunkards who described their degradation and redemption in the histrionic fashion of revivalists. As Thomas White, Jr, a Canadian temperance organizer, wrote in 1853, "the great Washingtonian Phalanx ... originated in the heart of drunkenness ... The drunkard of yesterday depicted in glowing colors, and with all the fire of living eloquence, the horrors of this evil, and called upon all to sign the pledge of emancipation."5 Composed in part of such reformed men (and sometimes women) and often led by them, the non-prohibitionist Washingtonians provided practical assistance to those who desired to give up drink, and emphasized that newly reclaimed drunkards should help others. "No sooner were the reformed signed and sober than they would be inducted into some minor office in the local society, and sent out to reclaim drinkers under the slogan, 'Every man brings a man/" 6 The "practical workings" of Washingtonian temperance occasionally included something akin to what we now call a recovery home.

94 Drink in Canada

Starting in 1841, the Boston society "fitted up rooms under their hall for the temporary accommodation of reformed, or rather, reforming, men." The Washingtonians of New York City established "houses of refuge" where "miserable inebriates were taken out of the gutter, and washed, and clothed, and lodged, and fed, and kept until they came to their right mind."7 Although short-lived, these efforts inspired later projects. A formal inebriate home was organized in Boston in 1857 and shortly thereafter was rechristened the Boston Washingtonian Home to honour the tradition from which it came. In San Francisco a mutual-aid temperance group known as the Dashaway Association (which reached as far east as St Louis and north to Victoria, British Columbia) founded an inebriate home in 1859. The Washingtonian Home of Chicago was organized in 1863; the Franklin Reformatory Home for Inebriates (Philadelphia) opened in 1872, and the Appleton Temporary Home (South Boston) in 1873. The Nova Scotia Inebriate Home in Dartmouth, fashioned after the Appleton Home, was managed by an Appleton "graduate" from its opening in 1875 to its demise in 1880. (Between 1873 and 1875 Appleton treated almost two hundred Canadians, most from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.) The ephemeral St George's Church Temperance Home operated near Montreal during 1875-76 with half of its managing committee "composed of men who for years had been abandoned drunkards and outcasts of society."8 By the mid-i84os the haphazardly organized Washingtonians were failing, and by the end of the decade had largely passed from the American scene. They were succeeded by a variety of temperance fraternities, some of which quickly established themselves in Canada. The most important of these were the Sons (and later Daughters) of Temperance (founded 1842) and the Independent (later International) Order of Good Templars (1851). The Sons and the Templars attempted at first to continue the Washingtonian tradition of reforming drunkards. At the same time they established themselves as secret, permanent, well-managed, centrally controlled organizations not unlike the Masons and Odd Fellows. However, the Templars were committed to prohibition from the start and the Sons followed in 1852. Although both organizations helped to found the Chicago Home and in Canada supported campaigns for inebriate institutions in Ontario and Nova Scotia in the early i86os, they increasingly devoted their attention to alcohol control measures, and in the case of the Templars to preventative work with children.9 As Emma J. Jones, California Grand Worthy Vice Templar, explained in 1870, "the object of our organization and the tem-

95 Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920

perance work of the present day is more to prevent drunkenness than to cure it." By 1879 the directors of the Nova Scotia Home could plausibly blame its failure, in part, on inadequate support from the local Sons and Templars.10 To many teetotallers, the failure of Washingtonianism's exhortative, evangelical sort of reform was no surprise. Since the late eighteenth century a number of physicians in America, England, and Europe had claimed that intemperance was a disease, a somatic condition that impaired the will and established a tyranny of the organism. Sick with a disease that resembled insanity, habitual drunkards needed medical supervision and treatment. In his influential tract of the 18305 Samuel Woodward explained that he had formed "the fullest conviction" that a "well-conducted institution" would restore habitual drunkards. He envisioned an institution organized like a lunatic asylum, relying upon "confinement and restraint" as opposed to "ineffectual" temperance methods based on "pledges, bonds, and oaths."11 The treatment of habitual drunkards in the mid- and late nineteenth century raised the issue of coercion, particularly the use of involuntary commitment. In turn, the debate about coercion reflected different understandings of the medical claim that inebriety was a disease.12 Indeed, it hinged on different views of human nature and God's role in earthly matters. In this paper I analyse two contemporaneous types of nineteenth-century inebriate institutions whose characters reflected different orientations to disease theory and involuntary confinement. As well, I review the largely unsuccessful movement by promoters of inebriate institutions to secure state support for their efforts to regenerate drunkards apart from their customary ports of call in jails, almshouses, and lunatic asylums. The first type of institution usually called itself an inebriate "home" or "retreat." Although not continuous with the ephemeral refuges of the 18405, inebriate homes descended from that tradition. They were "neo-Washingtonian" institutions that typically were small (fifty beds or fewer), urban, private, and charitable (nonprofit), and dedicated to the treatment of voluntary patients by noncoercive means for short periods of time (two weeks to three months as a rule). They were intimately connected with local temperance groups that provided support after residential treatment. From our perspective today, they appear "community-based." Inebriate "asylums," however, took inspiration directly from insane asylums and were similarly to be large, run under public

96 Drink in Canada

or quasi-public auspices, and possessed of the power to confine patients against their will for extended periods. Unlike neo-Washingtonian homes, asylums were to be organized into elaborate systems of wards to segregate patients by social and diagnostic criteria and voluntary or involuntary status, and they were to be isolated in rural areas. A Montreal physician, for instance, suggested that an inebriate asylum be built on an island in the St Lawrence, "where access to the main shore would be difficult, and where even then liquor could only be obtained by a walk of ten or more miles."13 In fact, very few inebriate asylums were established. Some were chartered but never opened (in Texas and Washington, DC, for example), and others were converted to institutions for the insane before they received patients (in Minnesota, California, and Hamilton, Ontario). The very first such asylum, at Binghamton, New York, was chartered in 1858 but remained unfinished until 1864. After years of controversy it was converted to an insane asylum in 1879. *4 The inebriate asylum was mainly an ideal, then, a vision of those who saw in it a medical solution to the vast problem of drunkenness in society. Their ambitious promoters intended asylums to serve as the clinical, research, and political base for what they hoped would be a new medical specialty. Just as insane-asylum superintendents organized themselves into the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII) in 1844, inebriate-asylum promoters organized the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates (AACI) in 1870.15 A Philadelphia member of the AACI put the organization's professional ambitions quite plainly: "Let us have hospitals for our inebriates! Let us teach our medical students the importance and the means of battling with that disease, then in a few years we will have a faculty of physicians prepared to do for inebriety what has been done for insanity."16 Most of the inebriety specialists were doctors. A few had evangelical sentiments that aligned them with the Washingtonian tradition; others were committed to a rigorously somatic and hereditarian medicine that yielded a doggedly materialistic, determined, and in the end pessimistic view of habitual drunkards. The latter were the asylum enthusiasts, advocates of strict, medically supervised control. For a few years the two factions coexisted in the AACI. Indeed, at its first meeting in November 1870 the organization adopted the ecumenical position that "every large city should have its local or temporary home for inebriates, and every state, one or more asylums."17 But by the mid- i88os the neo-Washingtonians had either

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drifted away or accommodated their views. Below I will discuss neoWashingtonianism in some detail, then turn to the asylum enthusiasts' critique and quest for a public treatment system. Even when speaking of inebriety as a disease, neo-Washingtonians emphasized the drunkard's residual freedom, what Dr Albert Day of the Boston Home called a self-control "not wholly lost."18 This irreducible freedom inhered in the human relationship with God, specifically the rational soul with which all human beings were endowed and which reflected the image of God. Sometimes referred to as a "mind" distinct from the brain, which was its "citadel" and interlocutor, this rational soul was immaterial, immortal, and accessible to proper appeal.19 It was to this exalted common conscience that neo-Washingtonians directed their treatment, which was in most cases frankly Christian (though in the tradition of Washingtonianism, non-sectarian). Dr PJ. Wardner of the Chicago Home wrote that religion "is not a mere sentiment; it is a vital experience of heart, a resolute exercise of the will" that worked in "defiance of all the world's torture." Rev. D. Banks MacKenzie, a born-again former drunkard (and self-ordained reverend) who ran the Appleton Home and inspired H.S.K. Neal, superintendent of the Nova Scotia Home, wrote that no matter how diseased the body, "complete and permanent reformation may be realized under the power of divine grace."20 This faith undergirded four assumptions widely shared by neoWashingtonians. The first was that all drunkards were curable. "The hardest drunkard who lives may be saved," the residents of the Boston Home wrote to their counterparts in Chicago. "There is no exception to this rule."21 In fact most neo-Washingtonians came to concede the incurable case, but they were reluctant to acknowledge such a permanent breach with God. In a ringing defense of curability, and characteristically mixing the vocabularies of the chapel and the consulting room, MacKenzie wrote: He [the drunkard] is a mass of physical and moral uncleanliness, in which, however, there is still a spark, a little something divine, not yet stifled, which, if reached, can be fanned into a purifying fire. If this last spark of divine manhood is absent, you can do nothing for him but pray. And then, it may be, you are too late even for prayer. Such cases are rare, but they do exist, and provisions ought to be made for their keeping. But friends, do not be hasty in giving up a victim as incurable. Your patience will be sadly tried, the men you had most confidence in will betray you, lie to you, deceive you

98 Drink in Canada and fall. Do not give up, forgive seventy times seven, so long as the prodigal comes back, acknowledges his willingness to try again, the spark is there yet .22

As these remarks suggest, the second assumption of neo-Washingtonians was that cure could be achieved only through the wholespirited, voluntary involvement of inebriates themselves. As Albert Day wrote, "The fundamental basis upon which all hopeful treatment must rest, lies in the desire of the patient himself to escape from the slavery that enthralls him. But little if anything can be accomplished in opposition to the wishes of the person to be treated."2? Consistent with their liberal Christian understanding of the will and its centrality to reformation, neo-Washingtonians also assumed that medicine was tangential to treating inebriety. Dr Robert P. Harris of the Franklin Home in Philadelphia rejected disease theory altogether. He explained that drunkenness was "a habit, sin and crime, [and] we do not speak of cases being cured, as in a hospital, but 'reformed.'" Drunkards who slipped had not relapsed but "broken faith."24 Similarly, Charles W. Earle, who succeeded Wardner as the Chicago Home's attending physician, attacked disease theory throughout the 18703, particularly the idea that inebriety was heritable and could extinguish the will. Day and Dr Arthur Hayne of the San Fracisco Home had more conciliatory views. Both believed that inebriety represented an often hereditary disease process, and both likened it to monomania. None the less, both shied away from the gloomy determinism of many hereditarians and construed the will as largely indestructible, though in the years before his death in 1894 Day became less optimistic, writing of an "imbecile and helpless" will rather than a self-control not wholly lost. Still, in the view of these doctors medical intervention merely restored the physical "tone" necessary for the will to resume its ascendency. "All that the medical man can do is to carry the unfortunate victim safely through his temporary insanity," Hayne observed, "and after reason has resumed her throne, to point out the path of safety."25 The "path of safety" lay in temperance fellowship and total abstinence from alcohol. Where local temperance groups were no longer interested in reclaiming drunks, reformed men created alternatives. Graduates of the Appleton Home formed their own temperance society, believing that "one of the best safeguards which can be thrown around the men who are endeavoring to conquer their appetite for strong drink, is to enlist them in the work of helping

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others."26 In 1877 the Nova Scotia Home helped found Halifax's MacKenzie Reform Club when its stigmatized graduates could find acceptance in only one division of the local Sons or Templars.27 Dr George Colburn, the San Francisco Home's superintendent from 1865 to 1876, summarized what was important: "We give them to understand that from this time they will have friends."28 Finally, neo-Washingtonians believed that struggle formed character - male character, at least. They were steeped in "manliness," and in the Washingtonian tradition they lionized the reformed. Wardner called the drunkard's reform "a heroic service of the life." Hayne wrote that if there was "any one entitled to the appellation of a hero, it is best exemplified in him who has had the moral courage - the self-resolution to free himself from the dominion of a vice, which like the folds of some hideous monster, has gradually encircled him, until he has become powerless and helpless." Day described men "struggling with heroic and inspiring courage against ... overwhelming temptation." According to an anonymous Nova Scotian, "He who can say to an ardent propensity ... a strong passion or appetite, Thus far shalt you go, and no farther/ is a moral hero, and in the estimation of Him who weighs human motives may be regarded as a greater conqueror than him whom nations admire."29 The language of moral heroism reflected a male discourse about recovery. It expressed the aggressive struggle for self-control necessary to success in the rough and tumble male sphere of the marketplace.30 While intemperance could be a manly flaw - a lamentable but surmountable worldly contamination - a woman's drunkenness was an almost unspeakable corruption of the purity essential to the proper socialization of children and the tutelage of baser men. As a result, women were more likely than men to be abstainers and became drunkards less often, but women inebriates were far more stigmatized.31 We know very little about inebriate institutions created for (and sometimes by) women. In the United States there were "industrial homes" for women run under temperance auspices as early as 1841, but these were not specialized institutions for inebriates. Like later efforts of the city mission movement and the Salvation Army and other cadres of the Holiness Movement, they sought mainly to teach occupational skills and domestic virtues while bringing Christ to single mothers, widows, former prisoners, and prostitutes. Martha Washington societies reclaimed women in the early 18405, but the decline of Washingtonianism ended the aggressive pursuit of female inebriates by their sisters. Neo-Washingtonian women's groups

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like the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Chicago Home and the Ladies' Dashaway Association of San Francisco ministered to reforming men and their families.32 Still, the San Francisco Home treated substantial numbers of women, and the Chicago Home operated a female department from 1869 until the mid-iS/os, then re-established it on a suburban campus in 1882. The Boston Home did not admit women, though throughout the i86os Albert Day appealed for the establishment of a local home that would. In January 1879 the New England (later Massachusetts) Home for Intemperate Women opened in Boston, aiming explicitly "to do a work for women similar to that of the Washingtonian Home for men." An attempt to found a Halifax women's home failed in 1878. One inebriate asylum, in Kings County, New York, admitted women as well as men during its lifespan of 1867 to 1898.33 Later, in about 1911, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd (Les Sceurs du Bon-Pasteur) opened the Pension SainteEuphrasie in Montreal "pour dames alcooliques et morphinomanes."34 The profound masculine emphasis on moral heroism survived long after neo-Washingtonianism was in disrepute among inebriety specialists. The Keeley Gold Cure, with its painful injections and the violent vomiting that sometimes resulted from the administration of apomorphine, strongly appealed to male dignity.35 Keeleyism, which flourished throughout North America between 1890 and 1920, was squarely within the tradition of therapeutic temperance: Keeley emphasized that treatment at an institute merely removed the craving for drink and that subsequent sobriety was a matter of character and will-power; graduates organized local clubs (Keeley Leagues) to provide continuing support; and Keeley men took pride in their restoration to a "noble manhood," even wearing gold lapel pins to identify themselves not merely as temperance men (a tradition much older) but as reformed drunkards.36 As a New York Keeley graduate observed about his compatriots, "There are no grander heroes under God's sunlight than the men who honestly fight against drink."37 Although heirs to the vision of Samuel Woodward, the asylum enthusiasts, the dominant group within the AACI, were influenced by somatic explanations of inebriety that developed after Woodward's time. In particular they readily absorbed French asylum superintendent Benedict Morel s theory of cumulative hereditary degeneration (1857), especially as it was linked artfully to Herbert Spencer's socio-biology by British neurologist Henry Maudsley (1867).38 They were also impressed with the theory of neurasthenia

ioi Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920

popularized by one of their own members, American neurologist George Miller Beard, who drew heavily on Spencer, Maudsley, and a vulgar Darwinism. A full explication of this intellectual history is well beyond the bounds of this essay, but a brief outline of its basic precepts is essential. Most important, somaticists in the AACI reified the will. Unlike neo-Washingtonian physicians, they belonged to a younger generation less impressed with the spirituality of religion than with the materialism of natural science. They construed human behaviour as an epiphenomenon of neurological activity that had no relation to an immaterial soul. As George Beard put it: "In perfect health man is a bundle of reflex actions, with a very small margin of volitional life; but in a disease of the nervous system, like inebriety, this small margin of what we call volition is swept away, and the man is an automaton." Henry Howard, a Montreal physician and provincial lunatic-asylum overseer, argued that those who believed in the medical treatment of inebriates must see "that it logically leads us to recognize the philosophical truth that every man is what his physical intellectual organization makes him." Thomas Crothers, longtime secretary of the AACI, observed concerning the "extraordinary" recovery of a chronic inebriate: "The fact that he succeeded this time is to the mind of many persons evidence of his will power. The true explanation is that some physiological change occurred in his brain and the alcoholic craze died out." The somaticists dismissed metaphysical questions of residual freedom and human purpose. Drunkards were "impelled by an invicible and inflexible law of their organization, to seek relief in the use of intoxicants, even when they know them to be destructive."39 The somaticists discounted and even pilloried anything that smacked of spirituality, moral heroism, or voluntarism. At bottom the moral heroes of neo-Washingtonianism were dangerous degenerates. They undermined medical authority and the whole inebriety movement by promulgating the erroneous notion that "personal experience as an inebriate gives a special knowledge and fitness for the study and treatment of this malady." In fact, "physicians and others who, after being cured, enter upon the work of curing others in asylums and homes, are found to be incompetent by reason of organic defects of the higher mentality." Voluntarism encouraged "exaggerated ideas of individual rights."40 Neo-Washingtonians were vulnerable to such attacks. By confining themselves to treating voluntary, tractable patients, the homes exposed themselves to the criticism that they failed drunkards, their families, and the community at large. In the first instance it was

iO2 Drink in Canada

claimed that they improperly reckoned with the nature of the disease of inebriety - that they mistook soberness for cure (or confused soberness with sobriety, to use modern terms). This was a frequent criticism of the homes by the superintendents of insane asylums, and it was a point taken to heart by asylum advocates in the AACI, who insisted that states establish the statutory means to commit habitual drunkards "till their cure or reformation are substantially secured." As Ontario Provincial Inspector Charles O'Reilly put it, "to make an Inebriate Asylum anything more than a sobering-up establishment," it "should be clothed with the authority to detain and control an inebriate for an indefinite length of time, months or years, if necessary."41 Similarly, the homes stood accused of wasting philanthropic dollars and failing adequately to protect drunkards' families or the general public from further depredations. In this respect an urban location combined with a philosophy of non-restraint was a liability. While the homes were accessible to the families and friends of patients and to local temperance groups, they could not ensure isolation from environmental hazards, notably the taverns. As a result, most of the homes temporized with voluntarism, "persuading" a resident to remain inside "until such a time as it is judged safe for him to go out and face the temptations that must meet him at every step."42 Some eventually accepted the necessity of involuntary confinement. The Nova Scotia Home, licensed under the provincial Habitual Drunkards Act of 1875, could legally receive involuntary inmates, committed to the home by family, friends, or even creditors. (But as the home's president observed, "none seem inclined to take advantage of the Act."43) The Chicago Home also could receive court-committed inebriates. The San Francisco Home had a unique relationship with the local police court, from which it derived a substantial portion of its budget before 1884. The home was used as an emergency hospital for inebriates, who often were brought in by police. Once sober, though, these men and women were not held in defiance of a wish to leave. However, beginning in the late i86os the home came under pressure from prominent temperance and public-health figures to retreat from its voluntaristic principles, and in 1876 it was transformed in part into a "probationary asylum" for the insane awaiting a lunacy examination. These patients were held involuntarily, and this practice was extended to many inebriates, thus ending the home's neo-Washingtonian phase.44 Promoters of the asylum model addressed the therapeutic and custodial shortcomings of neo-Washingtonian homes. Not only would asylums be economical, so the argument went, but they

103 Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920

would offer better care. "It is greatly in favor of large public asylums, that these are able to provide good libraries, well-supplied reading rooms, healthful amusements, and other means which do so much," wrote Daniel Dodge, medical superintendent of Binghamton, in 1871. "These things, which large institutions alone can sustain, are strong inducements to patients." Should patients not be induced sufficiently, "one great advantage possessed by state institutions, is that they have more power to restrain patients."45 Asylum enthusiasts sought the power of commitment to enable respectable, struggling families - mainly wives and parents - to control their disruptive members, and they sought the authority to keep these patients for long periods. Beyond the power of initial commitment, as provided by legislation like the Nova Scotia Habitual Drunkards Act, asylum keepers wanted the authority to hold on an involuntary basis those who entered of their own volition. As the AACI'S committee on legislation reported in 1872, "Men who are sensible of their malady; who are willing, nay, who earnestly desire to be healed; who are convinced that they need aid to restore to the diseased body health, and to the weakened will the power of resistance ... these are the men over whom we must have that power of legal restraint which we can bring to bear when, as will not seldom be the case, other means are found insufficient."46 But in its model legislation the AACI carefully protected the superintendents' prerogatives by providing that penal facilities be visited by an asylum representative to "determine who so confined are fit and proper subjects to be transferred."47 Until the late 18705, when it became expedient to take them, asylum promoters did not want responsibility for notorious police court "rounders," nineteenthcentury public inebriates who clogged the courts and populated the city prisons and county jails. Here asylum promoters and neo-Washingtonians had an important issue in common. In part this was a practical matter of managing extreme deviance within an institution. As the president of one asylum (a judge) observed, "Unless these establishments are kept free from dissolute and reckless characters, who will naturally drift into them as a last retreat, the hope of ever making them reformatory institutions may as well be abandoned at once. One profligate character is sufficient to demoralize a whole house; and if such influences are allowed to exist, the place will soon degenerate into a school of intemperance and vice ... The penitentiary, and not a reformatory institution, is the place for such men."48 Similarly, although the homes preached universal curability, they selected voluntary, motivated clients who would fit within their genteel milieux. Although on occasion "forced to take men direct-

1O4 Drink in Canada

ly from station houses, police courts, or temporary prisons/' it was "hard to force them into the company and association of peaceable and orderly gentlemen ... who, even in their cups, cannot brook companionship with subjects of police scrutiny."49 In practice, then, most of the homes took only those incarcerated drunkards who sincerely requested treatment or who risked death in jail. H.S.K. Neal, for instance, claimed selected men from the Halifax police court who would otherwise have gone to Rockhead Prison. Those he retrieved had to demonstrate "inherent manliness and moral honesty," the "only real foundation for permanent reform."50 Usually these were fallen members of the broad middling classes, or at least those who aspired to a future anchored by selfcontrol and self-improvement, values at the heart of temperance enterprise. Neo-Washingtonians did not gloss their moralism with science. Salvation in this life and the next was gained by choice and noble struggle. By contrast, George Beard, for whom freeedom was negligible and science was God, formulated an influential scientific rationale for treating patients from the middle class and those who aspired to it.51 He asserted that complex civilizations - those most advanced in evolutionary terms - demanded of their members a corresponding complexity of nervous-system organization and functions. It was this "finer organization" that distinguished civilized beings from savages, both in intellect and morality. At the same time, the very complexity of this finer organization made it susceptible to malfunction. Thus he believed inebriety to be among ten diseases that resulted from the escalating demands of modernity. Beard called the predisposition to such hereditary diseases a "nervous diathesis." Those afflicted with it were especially susceptible "to the unpleasant and injurious effects of stimulants and narcotics."52 Beard argued that true inebriety was found largely in "the better classes," for it was among the well-to-do that evolution had progressed farthest and among whom the pressures of "brain work" were greatest. But this did not square easily with the general belief that drunkenness was most common among the lower classes. Thus he fell back upon the common distinction of "intemperance the vice" from "inebriety the disease." The former was "most frequently found among the ignorant and degraded, and among the so-called criminal classes." The "vice of intemperance," he wrote, "is a survival of savagery in civilization ... It is among the depressed classes, who yet retain the habits, and the constitutions of the last century, that intemperance abounds." The disease of inebriety was something else again; it was a "disease of refinement," of "an indoor life,

io5 Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920

of brain-workers, of civilization."53 Inebriety, like other manifestations of neurasthenia, was a cross to be borne by those who had ascended the great ladder of evolution. Neurasthenia explained the diffuse complaints and moral lapses of driven, overworked Victorian clerks, managers, professionals, and housewives. When they drank, they were invalids in need of rest, hydropathy, and electrotherapeutics; those of a coarser, less refined sort were unevolved sots in need of strenuous discipline. This perspective appealed to doctors who kept proprietary asylums. It salved any wounds of conscience opened by turning away indigents; it flattered prospective patients. However, it turned out to have a serious shortcoming for those in the AACI who were building a public treatment movement: it offered no rationale for the medical treatment of the impoverished inebriates who were the bane of urban order and, after the financial Panic of 1873 and subsequent economic depression, the preoccupation of magistrates, jailers, general hospital administrators, and charity organizers throughout North America. "From the prison to the rum-shop, from the rum-shop to the gutter, and from the gutter back again to the prison, is the desolate orbit to which existence for them has been reduced," wrote Dr Lucy Hall of the working-class women in the Sherburne (Massachusetts) Prison in the early i88os. Wanted was an institution to provide "unremitting control and protection."54 Beginning in the mid-i87os and continuing over the economically unstable decades that followed, inebriate-asylum boosters turned their attention to formulating and promoting a public system of care and control that emphasized "unremitting control and protection" for degenerate, incurable criminals and paupers, and focused remedial treatment on hopeful, middle-class cases.55 Stemming the rising tide of disorder and racial degeneration was not a job that the asylum promoters particularly wanted; rather, it was a calculated bargain with the state: in return for the institutionalization of public responsibility for all habitual drunkards, inebriate asylums would take permanent custody of pauper inebriates and the ubiquitous rounders, removing them from lunatic asylums, jails, almshouses, general hospitals, and other institutions in which they were perennial nuisances. Thus, in 1877, in the wake of widespread unemployment, homelessness, and labour violence, Thomas Crothers proposed that inebriate asylums handle the tramp problem since "the large majority" of tramps "are intemperate, uneducated, and go steadily down from bad to worse." "Nothing," he wrote, "can be more appalling than this vast army of moving drunkards, drifting from place to place, a perpetual burden and tax on society, scatter-

106 Drink in Canada ing vice and crime everywhere." However, like the proposals of most leading charity organizers, Crothers' solution was essentially non-medical, relying upon punitive confinement in "large, judiciously managed work-houses or asylums, where labor is part of the treatment."*6 In building his case for the prolonged segregation of the destitute and troublesome, Crothers employed a degenerationism so grim that it all but denied the usefulness of anything but lifetime detention. Degenerates "have an exceedingly low sense of duty, and conceptions of right and wrong," he observed. "They are freighted with a peculiar diathesis [hereditary disposition], which breaks out into either criminality, insanity, inebriety or trampism, or one or more together ... and are always more or less incurable ... In the insane asylum they are the most troublesome of all cases; in the courts they are the repeaters, that are sent to jail regularly for intoxication; and in all circles, they are the pests of society, continually drinking, committing petty crime, and outraging society by all kinds of excess."57 These "gamblers, speculators, traveling men, showmen, patent right swindlers, dealers in alcohol and tobaccos ... bar-room loafers, hack drivers, low workmen, street tramps and beggars" were "treacherous, cowardly and sensitive," and commonly audacious, improvident, and possessed of a "strong dislike for work, and [a] general disgust for regular living." Some were given to "communism and railroad rioting."58 For these and other drunkards Crothers proposed an "industrial hospital," the ultimate inebriate asylum. To provide "benefits to society, to morals, and to civilization" and the obligatory "relief to the taxpayer," his solution was to arrest and commit all drunkards to such hospitals for an indefinite time, depending on the restoration of the patients; also commit all persons who use spirits to excess and imperil their own and the lives of others; put them under exact military, medical, and hygienic care, where all the conditions and circumstances of life and living can be regulated and controlled; make them self-supporting as far as it is possible; and let this treatment be continued for years if necessary. The recent cases will become cured, and the incurable will be protected from themselves and others, and made both useful and self-supporting.59 Its astonishing comprehensiveness notwithstanding, the industrial hospital was calculated not to disturb the market for private care for inebriates who could affort it. Just as exclusive, private psychiatric sanitaria flourished alongside public mental hospitals, the industrial-hospital notion permitted the parallel development of inebriate institutions. Commitment laws like those passed in

ioy Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920

Ontario (1873) and Connecticut (1874) allowed inebriates to be detained in proprietary institutions like the Homewood Retreat in Guelph and Crothers' Walnut Hill Lodge in Hartford. This legal authority over middle-class inebriates allowed private proprietors to support public institutions without qualms, for these were aimed at working-and lower-class patients who were neither in the private treatment market nor wanted there. Thus, when Dr John McKay, proprietor of the Belmont Retreat near Quebec City, was asked in 1892 by the Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic whether police court rounders should be treated in an inebriate institution, he replied, in effect, yes, but not in mine.60 The proposals of Crothers and his colleagues were intended to impress agents of the state with the potential versatility of the inebriate asylum, and indeed, asylum promoters had powerful allies in their quest for state support. Jailers were happy to be rid of the rounders; police court, almshouse, and general hospital administrators were similarly disposed; in 1875 the AMSAII endorsed the creation of inebriate asylums "on substantially the same footing" as insane asylums, stipulating that the institutional treatment of drunkards should be involuntary and of years' duration if necessary.61 In addition to whatever good they might do drunkards, specialized asylums would be extremely convenient for other overwhelmed institutions. The Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic heard such testimony from public officials all over Canada during 1892 and 1893, and similar evidence can be mustered from New York, Massachusetts, California, and other American states. Legislators were difficult to move, however. Committed to an economic philosophy that exalted capital accumulation, acutely conscious of the tax rate and the needs of growing cities and their investors for roads, piers, sewers, and other elements of the urban infrastructure, and plagued by unpredictable revenue during the cyclic busts of the late nineteenth century, they were loath to create or sustain costly and controversial institutions.62 The Toronto inebriate-asylum plebiscite of 1889 demonstrated the public treatment movement's difficulties. On 7 January 1889 the citizens of Toronto voted on a by-law to authorize its aldermen to spend $30,000 on an inebriate asylum. The bill was defeated by a two-to-one margin; it failed in all twelve wards.63 Perhaps the proposal's greatest shortcoming was its development by an elite group of physicians and jurists who were not themselves particularly clear about how the scheme would work, how much it would cost over time, or for whom it was intended. Dr C. Schomberg Elliot, the plan's prime mover and a member of the AACI, in a report to the Toronto city council in September 1887, focused on the police court

io8 Drink in Canada

rounder, arguing that a curative alternative to jail would save the city and the province vast sums in the administration of the police, the courts, the general hospital, the asylum, and so forth. However, he wanted the police magistrate to commit to an asylum only "cases of disease, and not of mere viciousness."64 The latter, of course, were a waste of time. But as a stream of letters to the Toronto Globe made clear, this Beardian distinction eluded popular understanding. On the one hand the promoters were condemned for supporting an institution "where drunkards of the better class may be sent to 'sober off/" and on the other they were chastised for the foolish belief that an asylum was capable of "reaching and controlling ... the Police Court class of habitual drunkards."65 Elliot, Dr Daniel Clark (superintendent of the Toronto Asylum), and other supporters also ran afoul of extreme prohibitionists. Some prohibitionists supported the scheme, noting that it would be funded in part from liquor licence fees and observing that "cure and prevention should go hand in hand." Others took a hard line. Several days before the election an anonymous circular called facetiously for five hundred workmen to construct four "special lunatic asylums" in which to lock up saloon-keepers.66 A thoughtful correspondent to the Globe posed questions for each ratepayer to ask before voting: (1) Can an institution of the capacity proposed [about 50] accommodate and cure the drunkards as rapidly as they are being made? (2) If not, will it not soon become necessary to enlarge and engage more attendants, etc.? (3) If we are to do justice to all, when and where will the expense end, unless some "sanitary" measures are at once adopted for the total suppression of the causes of the "epidemic" - drunkard manufactories?67

The most hostile and damaging remarks came from James H. Richardson, a prominent doctor and the local jail surgeon. He flatly (and correctly) rejected the 50-80 per cent cure rates claimed by Elliot for American inebriate asylums. He also ridiculed the idea that an inebriate asylum would save police and court expenses. "To suppose that any inebriate asylum could be 'largely if not entirely' maintained by doing away with 'our present method of arresting, trying and imprisoning the habitual drunkard/ is to my mind egregiously absurd. They will have to be arrested, tried and imprisoned in any case, and if these processes are not carried out by our present machinery, instead of any saving of expense, the expense will be doubled."

109 Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920

For Richardson, whose views were atypical of North American jail physicians, the answer was to make the jail serve as an inebriate institution through longer sentences and better discipline. He did not see "any necessity or advantage in providing any other accommodation for this class than that which already exists."68 Another local physician preferred an all-purpose "House of Correction" for "the habitual drunkard ... tramps and for persons convicted of light offenses." A six-month term of "industrial employment and reformation of character" would "meet the case better than [an institution] devoted exclusively to the reformation of inebriates."69 In sum, the Toronto inebriate-asylum promoters failed to convince the ratepaying public, including many of their medical colleagues, that an inebriate asylum had anything distinctively medical or curative about it. All parties to the debate agreed that involuntary confinement was necessary; there were no neo-Washingtonians in this fray. At issue, emphasized the superintendent of the Toronto General Hospital, was "an asylum, not a retreat." But throughout the debate the inebriate doctors were absolutely silent about any specifically medical procedures that produced cure in drunkards, and the inebriate asylum that relied solely upon custody and discipline, and that aimed to gather in police court rounders, could not easily be distinguished from a House of Correction or from Toronto's increasingly strict almshouse, called a House of Industry.70 The fatal flaw of the inebriate-asylum/industrial-hospital concept was not its extremity but its superfluity. If disciplined custody was to be the fate of indigent, habitual drunkards, then the jails, prisons, almshouses, and even insane asylums would do just as well. After the by-law failed, Elliot became superintendent of the private Deer Park Sanitarium in Toronto. Established by former supporters of the public asylum, it opened in November 1891 in a three-storey building on three acres of land. Admission was voluntary or by commitment under Ontario law. Like many other proprietary asylums, Deer Park used the bad image of public asylums as an advertising ploy. "All the surroundings are made so pleasant and attractive that patients will not be subjected to that feeling of social degradation which is commonly experienced in public institutions," its prospective patients and their families were advised.71 Under the circumstances, it was a bizarre commentary on the institution's provenance. The treatment movement's failures continued: the California legislature chartered the Southern California State Asylum to specialize in

no

Drink in Canada

inebriates in 1888, but withdrew this mandate before the asylum opened five years later. In 1891 a plan to resurrect the Nova Scotia Home did not get beyond incorporation.72 Inebriates were left to jails, almshouses, public mental hospitals, and private sanitaria. The rounders in particular were commended to the Salvation Army and other urban church missions. The origins of the skid-row mission lie in the middle-class, evangelical, city mission movement, which grew in close relation to the temperance movement.73 However, the city missions's genteel mould was shattered by Jerry McAuley's Helping Hand for Men, founded on New York City's Water Street in October 1872. McAuley was a hulking, thirty-three-year old, born-again river thief, prison inmate, and drunkard. ("Oh, wasn't I a dirty rag shop of a man," he said of himself.) With his wife, Maria, a reformed drunkard and prostitute, he created an enduring institutional form based on indiscriminate material aid, the revivalist and temperance tradition of the drunkard's confession and conversion, and a ruckish style of preaching that played fast and loose with scripture.74 McAuley's mission was of a piece with the Gospel Temperance and Reform Club revivals of the decade and with the therapeutic temperance of neo-Washingtonianism. In 1877 McAuley's financial backers, mostly prominent evangelical businessmen, founded the New York Christian Home for Intemperate Men. Along with the Franklin Reformatory Home in Philadelphia, which "spun off" a gospel mission in the i88os, the New York Home was one of Thomas Crothers' favorite objects of ridicule.75 By his death in 1884 McAuley had many imitators across the continent. By the unprecedented depression of the 18905 the mission form was an urban commonplace; the best known was the Salvation Army, which had independent roots in England but quickly absorbed the spirit of North American evangelism.76 By 1894 the Army had missions throughout North America where reformed men issued their "testimonies": "You all know me and what I used to be," they often began. The San Francisco Lifeboat, a i9o-bed men's shelter, devoted half its space to "a tin-lined dormitory especially for drunks, presided over by a 'patient brother' who prayed for every man."77 By 1898 the Army ran shelters for the homeless, woodyards for the unemployed, soup kitchens, and homes for "fallen women." Its Toronto Woman's Shelter reserved its seventeen beds each night for "the very lowest of vagrants and drunken women."78 Even Dr Abner Rosebrugh, an admirer of Thomas Crothers, recommended to the Ontario prison commissioners that "the more hopeful class of female drunkards" be handled by the Army's refuges (others to be indefinitely confined).79

in Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920 In 1903, when the Army's ambitious back-to-the-land scheme was failing, its Fort Herrick Colony, near Cleveland (but "nine miles from the nearest bar"), was converted into an "industrial colony" for inebriates.80 In the first decades of the twentieth century the industrial or farm colony - which is to say, a rusticated workhouse eclipsed the inebriate asylum/industrial hospital as the favoured institutional approach to managing habitual drunkards. Throughout western Europe state work colonies had been created to handle impoverished inebriates, vagrants, ex-prisoners, and others of similar stripe by the early i88os. The penal colonies among them became inspirations to North Americans who sought to solve the problems of urban disorder through institutional segregation, or what American settlement worker Robert Hunter called "social dredging," the removal of society's detritus to a safe distance from the city.81 Prompted by railroad representatives (no friends to tramps), New York City reformers like Hunter, the Salvation Army, and by Edmund Kelly, whose book The Elimination of the Tramp (1908) bore the endless subtitle By the Introduction into America of the Labor Colony System Already Proved Effective in Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, with the Modifications Thereof Necessary to Adapt This System to American Conditions, the New York State legislature authorized the purchase of a tramp colony site in 1911. When the colony failed to materialize, New York City established its own Hospital and Industrial Colony for inebriates.82 The industrial colony, like the industrial hospital, blurred any practical distinction between medical and correctional institutions. But unlike the imposing vision of an industrial hospital, the colony was modest in scope. It was inexpensive and intended to receive only those for whom less extreme measures had failed. Usually it was linked to the Boston (or Massachusetts) Probation System, widely praised for managing drunkenness and recommended in the bible of North American philanthropy, Amos G. Warner's American Charities. The Boston System, which emphasized probation for first offenders and progressively longer institutional sentences for repeat offenders, was the basis of Abner Rosebrugh's recommendations to the government of Ontario in 1898 on behalf of the Prisoners' Aid Association of Canada, and guided the practices of the Ontario Society for the Reformation of Inebriates, which beginning in 1906 diverted co-operative "inebriate prisoners" from the Toronto police court into a special ward of the Toronto General Hospital. Optimally, Rosebrugh argued, "hopeful cases" should be managed with probation and treatment in an inebriate asylum or "cottage hospital," whereas "hopeless or incorrigible" drunkards should be "detained on indeterminate sentences" in an industrial or farm

112 Drink in Canada

colony. This system would provide "maximum efficiency" with "minimum expense."83 Roseburgh's lobbying, however, was unsuccessful; an inebriate asylum was not built. Colonies for inebriates, usually connected with county jails but sometimes conducted under public-welfare auspices, were established throughout North America between about 1910 and 1925. In the end they were all that the first North American treatment movement had to show for nearly a century of agitation for state support. While the movement had some late political successes, they were modest and short-lived. In 1893 Massachusetts established the State Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates at Foxborough, but it was plagued by escapes, patient rebellions, and the accumulation of recidivists. In 1910 a farm colony for chronic cases was opened at Norfolk to relieve Foxborough. Iowa founded a small hospital for inebriates in 1904, and Minnesota followed in 1908.84 But these specialized public institutions were closed or converted to other uses by 1919. With Prohibition, North American legislatures proceeded "on the optimistic assumption that the ounce of prevention had eliminated the need for the pound of cure." By the 19205 only private sanitaria remained, apart from public mental hospitals and a few inebriate wards in city or county hospitals.85 A few of these private institutions, like Maplewood Farms in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, treated inebriates with hypnotism and other techniques associated with North America's emerging dynamic psychology. Founded in 1909, Maplewood was run by Boris Sidris, a Harvard psychologist trained by William James.86 Sidris and other followers of the "new psychology" attempted to bridge the antagonism between their spiritualistic and somaticist forebears by exploring what they took to be a dialectical relationship between material and immaterial dimensions of being. They were greatly interested in the psychology of religious conversion, particularly as such experiences "cured" drunkards like Samuel Hadley, Jerry McAuley's successor on Water Street. Although sceptical that "a divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about," the new psychologists were far more alert than the somaticists to the dynamics of faith and moral heroism.87 As a young new psychologist, George B. Cutten, wrote of the converted inebriate in 1907, "The coward of yesterday is the hero of to-day, he fears neither men nor demons, he is strong in his newly found love and friendship and unshaken in his determination and hope. This is an important element in the change which comes to him, enabling him to battle against the habit which he has feared and striven against in vain." Although it was the perfectly explicable and secular product of

ii3 Inebriate Institutions, 1840-1920

"suggestion" and a "subconscious development which suddenly ripens and thrusts itself into consciousness," conversion involved "the awakening of the will, awakening as though from sleep, the sleep of years, and thoroughly refreshed, it takes its rightful position and begins to assume control."88 The therapeutic implications of the new psychology were largely ignored by those who managed indigent inebriates in public institutions and by the dwindling old guard in the AACI, who continued to promote disciplined custody punctuated by purgatives, baths, massage, and electrical stimulation, combined with rigorously supervised parole. In his last major work, Inebriety (1911), Thomas Crothers expressed a grudging and circumscribed respect for "mental therapeutics," but remained a resolute degenerationist committed to "sharp military restraint" enforced indefinitely by the legal authority of the state.89 Crothers died in 1918; the AACI, failing badly since before the First World War, lingered into the 19205 and passed away unremarked. In December 1934 Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, experienced an awakening of the will.90 He immediately "devoured" William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience from "cover to cover."91 In the early methods and philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, particularly its emphasis on service to other drunks, voluntary treatment, and the establishment of recovery homes by some of its followers, there was a revival of therapeutic temperance, complete with its unabashed spirituality yoked awkwardly to biological metaphors. The legacy of the asylum promoters is more dubious. Clearly, the "father" of modern disease theory, the Yale Center's E.M. Jellinek read Thomas Crothers and others of the dominant theorists in the AACI, and was influenced by them more than he let on.92 However, although Jellinek's famous typology of alcoholism built in part on old ideas, he was working in a very different professional context during the late 19303. The mental-hygiene movement was transforming North American psychiatry. As the profession developed a significant community base of practice in the years after the First World War, the prestige of the asylum doctors and their institutions began to erode.93 By Jellinek's time at Yale, the era of the asylum was yielding to the age of the clinic. "Ten years ago I had the feeling that most alcoholics should be institutionalized," wrote the esteemed Harvard psychiatrist Robert Fleming in 1944, "but I have changed my mind on that." A week's treatment in a general hospital followed by community-based psychotherapy and AA participatio

H4 Drink in Canada

was Fleming's new prescription. The seminal Yale Plan clinics, first proposed in 1943, represented a model of treatment congruent with the aims of "social psychiatry" and the mental-hygiene movement. The Yale Plan, developed in Connecticut, home of the departed Thomas Crothers, was recommended in lieu of a state "alcoholism farm," another timid and frugal version of the industrial hospital. The modern treatment movement had forsworn the well-conducted asylum.94

6 'The spectre of a drunkard's grave": One Family's Battle with Alcohol in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada JAMES L. STURGIS

THE REVEREND JOHN RENNIE

On 25 September 1895 a weary and worried Presbyterian minister from Ontario, John Rennie, boarded the Chicago fast train, bound for Mexico City. As the train set forth on the first leg of its journey to St Louis, he could not help but reflect anxiously on his mission's chances of success - a mission to save his second son, Will, a victim of alcoholism. Whether he could get to Mexico on time, whether he could locate his son and get proper medical treatment - a life depended on such details.1 During his long years in the ministry he had witnessed many instances of the destructive power of drink, but now it was his own offspring who needed rescuing from its grip. Perhaps now even Will realized that he must find a way out of the vicious spiral that had dragged him down. This was by no means the first occasion on which John Rennie, for the very same cause, had suffered financially and emotionally on behalf of his sons. Nor was it to be the last. The collective biography of the Rennie family will be presented to offer a personal perspective on the tragedy of alcoholism in the late nineteenth century and to promote a more sympathetic understanding of what lay behind the period's fervid advocacy of temperance. Too often temperance is studied simply as pressure-group politics, which divorces it from the social and familial misery from which it sprang.2 Of course, temperance literature abounded with

n6 Drink in Canada

its own moral tales and object lessons, but usually they were anonymous and glamorized, if not actually apocryphal. Thus it represents an important departure to reveal the details of one family's battle with alcohol, based on sound documentary evidence. The pain and suffering inflicted on alcoholics and those close to them, the duplicities that are practised and the resolutions fitfully adhered to, form a large part of this story. It has resonance as well for the present day, where alcoholism continues to take a heavy toll, affecting approximately 10 per cent of the population in industrialized societies. The details of this family battle enable us to learn a great deal about the drinking customs and social mores of the late nineteenth century. In addition, we can see alcoholism as the price exacted from many young men trying to find a way of earning a living in a sluggish Canadian economy, a condition that induced many to seek their fortunes in the United States or further afield and that resulted in social isolation. But why some succumbed and others did not, even within one family, takes us into psychological territory where exact answers about motivation are not always possible. In many respects John Rennie was a most unlikely candidate to suffer from the trials and tribulations associated with alcoholism. He himself was a lifelong teetotaller and belonged to a church that was in the forefront of the temperance struggle. Born in 1830, Rennie was a Scottish immigrant who studied theology at Knox College in Toronto. Upon graduation in 1857 he married Ann Taylor, who, like him, was a native of Aberdeen. John and Ann Rennie were the parents of seven children. The first born was John (known to his brothers as Jack) in 1859, followed by two girls - Annie in 1860 and Mary in 1863. Then came four sons - William in 1865, Jim in 1869, Dave in 1871, and George in 1877. John Rennie was neither able nor perhaps inclined to involve himself intimately in the day-to-day upbringing of his children. That task fell to Ann Rennie, whose simple but firm faith sustained her in frequent bouts of poor health. Her vulnerability made family members anxious, if it was at all possible, to shield her from unsettling news. There were delicious moments of family joy such as Jim's building of a new barn in 1877, Annie's marriage in 1884, and Jack's graduation from the Michigan College of Medicine in 1883. But there was also the grief. Like some underground river running through their lives was the scourge of consumption. Known at the time as the "white plague," its wayward course was as perplexing and devastating as cancer is

Reverend John Rennie and son Jim

n8 Drink in Canada

today. No sooner had Annie married than she began to show symptoms of the disease and died within a matter of months. Rennie's first charge, in late 1857, was in Beachville, near Woodstock, Ontario, where he paid special attention to the negro community in nearby Buxton, participating in some of their rallies on the eve of the American Civil War.3 The Canadian Presbyterian Church, of which John Rennie was a member, was, as John Moir has pointed out, "an ethnic church." Partly to ward off the unsavoury connection with revolution that American Presbyterianism had earned in the eighteenth century, the links with Scotland were assiduously cultivated. It was not surprising then that the split in the parent church in 1843 was replicated in Canada. Increasingly, the more evangelical wing of the church, to which Rennie adhered, emphasized its Canadianism, which provided a bridge for the reunion that occurred in 1875.4 With his ecumenical outlook, Rennie had long lamented its division. Throughout his career he worked in close harmony with Methodists and Baptists, particularly at revivalist and temperance functions.5 An important element of the Scottish heritage in Canada was a concern for social questions, including a strong, if minority, interest in temperance. The crudities and excesses of Canadian drinking customs strengthened these convictions. Rennie, for example, was shocked by the experience of attending a funeral in 1856 of a man who, he believed, had died of drink, yet which was marked by the serving of copious quantities of liquor in the very room where the body was laid out.6 The Canadian Presbyterian Church was in the vanguard of the change in emphasis among temperance advocates during the i86os and 18705 from moral suasion to legal prohibition or local option. In 1869 Rennie received and retained a pastoral letter, in the form of a pamphlet, from the renowned preacher and moderator of synod W. Ormiston. The letter was an indictment both eloquent and slashing of the social, familial, and individual damage for which the drink trade was responsible. Even moderate drinkers were not safe, as it was from their ranks that the human sacrifices of the future were drawn. To parents, he directed the following words: Your influence is great, your example is powerful, let them ever be on the side of sobriety and safety; you are aware of the dangers to which your loved ones are exposed, prepare them to meet and successfully brave them, but inculcating upon them from their childhood the practice of total abstinence from all that can intoxicate. Should your children follow your counsel, will it ever prove to them or to you a matter of regret? Should they

H9 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave" reject it, they may bring your grey hairs with sorrow to the grave, but your conscience will be clear, pure from their blood.7

As a minister John Rennie was a tireless worker who, throughout his long career, never had a large, prestigious city congregation. Always he had several churches in separated communities to tend. His sermons displayed a concern, typical within Canadian Protestantism, for national development and moral regeneration. In a sermon of 1895 Rennie emphasized how important a role the church had, amidst a population of "a mixed and motley character," in laying proper foundations of "a great empire" that might soon number fifty million people. The main danger facing the country was not external aggression but sin itself. It was necessary for "the whole army of the living God" to battle against this destructive power so that eventually "our beloved country is purified and saved."8 As part of his duties he called upon church members who were known to be drinkers and urged them to reform.9 In recognition of his efforts on behalf of "Gospel Education and Temperance" he received both a scroll and a new buggy from admirers.10 In 1888, at the age of 58, Rennie moved his family from a comfortable posting in Ailsa Craig, near London, Ontario, to the distant community of Sault Ste Marie, and shortly thereafter to the even more remote Manitowaning district. The financial pressures of bringing up a large family might well have made the annual salary of $850 offered at Sault Ste Marie irresistible. Although ministerial salaries were comparatively better than today, Rennie was never free of financial worries. In 1877 he was able, however, to purchase 1,280 acres of land in Manitoba, mainly in the hope that they would provide a patrimony for his sons.11 He was at times hard pressed to meet various financial exigencies and unable to help his children the way he wanted. This was especially so in the i88os, when his children in succession were completing their education. On at least one occasion he had to cash in shares of bank stock in order to meet a crisis.12 In the 18905 it was necessary to call upon his own reasonably affluent son David to share in the expenses of family emergencies. Shortly after he retired from the ministry in 1902 the total sum of his savings account was $1,239.22, a modest total after forty-five years of service.13 Yet the ability to stare illness or misfortune in the face and still count his blessings was well captured in John Rennie's diary for 13 August 1910: "I have much reason to be thankful to God for the blessings of 80 years. My health is fairly good tho' my strength has greatly failed and I am troubled with dizziness and I

i2o Drink in Canada

have some other physical troubles. I certainly might be worse than I am."1* DR JACK RENNIE

There are always high hopes for a first child. Success or failure can set precedents for those who come after. The aim of the Kennies in regard to Jack was to direct him towards the medical profession. One route an aspiring young doctor could follow in the late nineteenth century was to find work with a druggist in order to get practical experience. Thus it was in April 1877 that John Rennie took Jack to London to begin an apprenticeship of this kind. After finding a boarding room for Jack, his father prayed that he would be preserved from "all evil in the city."15 Jack, as it transpired, liked neither his employer nor his working conditions. He complained in letters home that he had caught a cold from having to wash bottles in cold water. Since it was also difficult to find much time to study, he stated his wish to return home and take private lessons.16 It was unlikely, however, that John could afford to maintain him. Accordingly, Jack worked with a druggist in nearby Parkhill in 1878 and by 1880 was in Windsor.17 Undoubtedly as a result of Windsor's proximity to Detroit, he was drawn to seek entry into one of the many newly established colleges of medicine there. The one he entered, the Michigan College of Medicine, had been in existence for only a few years when Jack began a two-year course in 1881. Except for the law, the guarding of standards and privileges of the professions was still in its infancy at this time.18 As many doctors found out, it was far from easy to establish one's credibility. One doctor looking back from the vantage point of the 19305 recalled the low esteem in which surgeons had been held prior to a revolutionary change in standards and attitudes in the late nineteenth century. As he put it, in those early days surgeons washed their hands after the operation.19 Part of the problem for Jack was the burgeoning number of graduates coming out of as yet unproven institutions. When it was suggested to him that he might try to set up a practice in Buffalo, his reply was that there would be equal difficulty there since it had as many colleges and graduates as Detroit.20 Jack never seriously entertained the idea of returning to Ontario. In an era of depression, at least one million Canadians had migrated, at least temporarily, to the United States.21 For some young men this transience would be only a temporary stage before they settled down, but for others it became a preferred way of life. There was consequently a floating population of young males

Dr John F. (Jack) Rennie

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whose only recreation was the saloon, where con men of all kinds flourished amid the drinking and the gambling. In sum, seeking one's fortune could shade over into an addiction for wanderlust that, for the most vulnerable, could become a kind of mobile skid row. Jack Rennie was very impatient for success. The meagre returns from his initial practice in Detroit Junction grated on him. To try to make ends meet he worked in a drugstore in the city for seven hours a day at a rate of four dollars per week. Perhaps it was hardly surprising that he should have expressed keen interest in following the example of a Dr McClellan, who travelled about, had just spent two years in California, and had "lots of money." By mid-1885 Jack would appear to have found the kind of migratory doctor with whom he could practise. This was a certain Dr Hartley, and in his employ Jack spent short spells in Buffalo and Chicago.22 Jack's brother Will joined him in Chicago in March 1886 before both of them moved to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and began working with a Dr Plunkett. The two brothers lived closely together, enjoying each other's company immensely. But it was not long before Jack again became discouraged and therefore a ready listener to the plans of Dr Hartley that they should go to Australia. According to Will, Jack was much taken by the idea, saying that he must go but would be back as soon as he made a little money. Will was opposed to the scheme but was reluctant to press his point of view. While Jack was debating what to do, Will was asked by Dr Plunkett to go to a nearby settlement in order to make arrangements to set up a new practice. After being there only a day or two, Will received a telegram from Jack asking him to meet Jack on the noon train for Chicago. The message arrived too late, however, and by the time Will got to the station, the train had departed.23 By September 1886 Jack was in San Francisco, bound for Australia,24 and ultimately Hobart in Tasmania, where he practised for about a year before moving on, alone, to Dunedin in New Zealand. Jack's account in letters of subsequent events in Dunedin differs in numerous important respects from a report that appeared in the Canterbury [N.Z.] Times in May 1888. In Jack's rendering of events, his problems stemmed from the jealousy of the Dunedin doctors, who did not wish him to practise. It all started, according to Jack, when he met up with a French couple, the Duflots. Dr Duflot was a dentist with whom Jack agreed to work. However, endless delays were encountered in getting on the medical register because of the hostility of the local doctors. Finally, Jack had to take his case to court, which was both time-consuming and expensive. Even after

123 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave"

he won his case, the Dunedin doctors continued to harass Duflot and Jack. They tried various ruses to try to establish that it was really Duflot, and not Jack, who dealt with the patients. They would send incurable cases to the office. They also arranged for women to go to the surgery to ask for abortions. Finally, when all else failed, a charge of malpractice was brought against Jack. The jury quickly came to a verdict of not guilty, but the episode was once again costly in legal fees. Meanwhile, the Duflots had moved on to Christchurch and Jack subsequently joined them. Once in Christchurch he suffered serious bodily injuries when a gig in which he was travelling on a call overturned upon him. This was mild, however, compared with the complications that ensued when the Duflot's twenty-one-year-old son arrived from Paris, only to drown in a nearby river. As if that were not enough, legal bills kept coming in that Jack could not pay, despite having had savings worth $150 at one point.25 The newspaper account of Jack's difficulties gives an entirely different version of events. It established that Jack was in the employ of Dr Duflot, who was a Canadian medical doctor. Duflot had examined a patient by the name of Love with a very serious illness who later alleged that Duflot had guaranteed to cure him. Duflot charged the man twenty-two dollars and began a course of treatment. Before completing it, however, Duflot left for Christchurch and put Jack in charge. But Jack suddenly resigned his position with Duflot and advised his patients that Duflot was an imposter and a quack. If they chose to sue for malpractice, Jack would support them. Duflot then telegraphed to Jack asking him to come to Christchurch, which Jack refused to do until "a lady member of the Canadian doctor's party" personally came to Dunedin and changed his mind. Jack now advised all concerned to drop their legal proceedings, which all but Love were willing to do. It was this case that went to a court of law. The clear implication is that Jack's motive in acting the way he did was to find a way of raising his salary of twenty-five dollars per month.26 It could be added as well that a scouring of the same newspaper did not bring to light any report of the drowning of a Duflot son. It may be surmised that there were too many rough edges to the relationship between Jack and the Duflots for it to have lasted much longer. Not surprisingly, Jack was soon on his travels again, this time ending up in Auckland. For the family in Canada there were renewed reasons for worrying about the state of Jack's health and hoping that he might return home. When in Dunedin he reported that he had not been "very well for the last few weeks." He had a severe fever, which caused

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the thinning and greying of his hair.27 Then came the accident in Christchurch, which would have made it difficult for the family to abide by Jack's instructions not to worry. As for when he might return home, he displayed a somewhat waspish temper to his sister Mary for having asked such a "foolish question."28 Far from obliging by answering on this vital point, Jack next turned up in Sydney, New South Wales. To Mary he confided in May 1889 that he had been in the Sydney hospital and that he was not "at all strong." He asked her to make certain to keep this news from his parents.29 But with the paucity of news from Jack, their distress only increased. John Rennie appealed to Jack, reminding his son that he could not expect to be many more years in the active ministry and that he yearned for the return of his boys who were far from home.30 In 1890 Jack struck north for the mining towns of northern Queensland, ending up in Charters Towers in August. While still in Sydney, however, he had suffered another of those seemingly endless misfortunes that plagued him. Jack had met up with two individuals, a certain John Dawson and an expatriate Canadian called James Frankum, who sold medicines on behalf of the Queensland Eucalyptus Oil Company. Jack, who was taken on as a medical specialist for the company, entrusted all his medical diplomas and equipment to Frankum's trunk. When Frankum left it carelessly open, Jack's effects were stolen by an individual who used them to barter his way on a steamer to Hong Kong in return for medical services. Thus, as Jack despaired of his situation in Queensland, a fraudulent Dr Rennie was enjoying the boon of free travel at his expense.31 At this time it took three months for a letter to wend its way from the tropical heat of northern Queensland to the frigid austerity of northern Ontario. On Wednesday, 10 December 1890, John Rennie, in Spanish River, opened a letter from James Frankum and John Dawson informing him that his son had died on 30 August in Charters Towers. With the letter was a copy of the death certificate, which gave the cause as consumption and exhaustion. His age, which must have been estimated from his appearance, was given as thirty-eight. The letter also informed John Rennie that Jack had been "very hard up financially." The grieving father began to make immediate arrangements for the erection of a headstone over Jack's grave and the retrieval of the few remaining personal effects.32 Within the family no one was more deeply affected by Jack's death than Will. In a comforting letter to his father, Will recalled his close association with Jack while in Illinois and Wisconsin:

125 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave" I cannot keep back the tears as the events of those few months all come back to me - We were then both full of life and hope, both enthusiastic over our different plans for the future, both anxious to see the world, and perhaps a little too anxious to make money. We would sit alone for hours building "Castles in the Air" and devising the most wonderful schemes for making fortunes rapidly, and as soon as one would fall through, we would still be bouyed [sic] up with the hope that the next would succeed.33

When writing to his brother Dave, however, Will was much more explicit about the reasons for his brother's difficulties. He believed that Jack "never expected to live to be an old man," and, knowing him as he did, added revealingly that "the same misfortunes and troubles that sent Jack to an early grave have been mine also."34There was no doubt in his mind that Jack had drunk his way around the world. Although Jack's health was never good, his letters nevertheless contain some of the suspiciously familiar code words for incapacitation by drink, such as not "feeling well" or attributing being "laid up" to general disabilities such as colds and fevers. The expenses of drinking would also reveal why, despite his medical training, he was always so desperately short of money. It would also explain why he had to exaggerate, or even fabricate his difficulties in order to make it appear that his lack of means was the result of either bad luck or the evil designs of others. The suspicion remains that while Jack suffered more than his fair share of misfortunes, a significant portion of them were self-made. WILLIAM C. RENNIE

As John Rennie made his way towards Mexico in September 1895, he could have had few illusions, as he undoubtedly had with Jack, about the basic cause of Will's problems. The second son's battles with alcohol addiction had, by the force of events, become known to the family. Of all the boys, Will was the most sensitive and artistic. He earned his living by touching up and tinting photographs. As he travelled through new and strange territory, he displayed a genuine interest in what he saw and heard. He gloried in warm sunshine and open blue skies and could rarely think of the Canadian winter without shuddering. Of an affectionate nature, he longed for the closeness of human contact he had enjoyed with Jack in 1886. As little as he liked northern climates did he like northern people. He despised "those hard, cold, sharp Yankees who never have time

ia6 Drink in Canada to pass a civil word with a stranger unless there is money in it." Instead, he much preferred the "kindly-natured, open-handed easygoing Southerners who are always so eager to extend courtesies and show hospitality to strangers."35 How natural for Will, therefore, to conduct his wanderings in the southern United States, mainly Texas, as well as Mexico. However satisfying this choice of location was for Will in human and climatic terms, it did pose grave dangers for his physical health. In the American West, what has been called the "explosive drinking style" prevailed; the causes of such binge drinking varied, but prominent among them were the lack of organized entertainment, the cheapness and easy availability of drink, and the frequent absence of even rudimentary elements of social control such as law officers. Adding to the problem was the very nature of a predominantly male society composed of rootless and alienated individuals who, involved as they often were in long periods of monotonous labour, sought conviviality and release in drink.36 All this led to patterns of intermittent heavy drinking, usually to the point of unconsciousness, followed by more or less lengthy periods of return to the ethic of hard work and sobriety.37 Such were the society and the tradition within which Will, who in his own view of himself was a timid man,38 would need to find the tools for survival. Initially John Rennie had made arrangements in 1884 for Will and his brother Jim to be set up in business in London, but a disastrous fire forced the abandonment of this plan.39 Will then spent several months in Detroit in the hopeless pursuit of what his father always called "a situation."40 After further frustrations of this kind, the plan was hatched, most likely at Jack's instigation, that Will should join him in Chicago. There followed the idyllic five months, from March 1886, that the brothers spent together. Shortly after Jack's abrupt departure, Will began his ramblings southwards and in late 1887 was in Kansas City.41 In 1888 he travelled with a partner, referred to in his letters only as Starkey, but by April 1889 he was alone in El Paso, Texas, where he was enchanted by the flowers, gardens, and orchards of the old city. From there he made side trips into mining camps such as Silver City, "a wild unsettled sort of place."42 He then ventured south into Mexico. It was to be expected that a young Canadian of his background, however much he had shed of his former existence, would find many of the Mexican religious and popular customs distasteful. At Puebla, for example, he lamented the fanaticism of the local faith, particularly the practice of charging the inhabitants exorbitant sums of money to kiss the bones of deceased priests and archbishops. Most

William C. Rennie

128 Drink in Canada disconcerting on one occasion was the very real threat made against his life, if he did not learn to show proper respect for religion by lifting his hat as he walked past a church. Will found many of the Americans and Englishmen in Mexico better left alone. They were to be found mainly in the mining camps that Will found it necessary to visit because here there were men with money and, perhaps, the need to send a photograph home. While at Pachuca he witnessed the behaviour of the Cornish tin miners, who seemed "to take turn about on the spree, one half of them work while the other half get drunk." At the conclusion of one riotous dinner, the miners all got "up on top of the table, singing 'Rule Britannia' and firing off their pistols threw the ceiling."43 But the Mexicans could be very dangerous too, and more than once he experienced cold fear for his personal safety. In Will's estimation they combined a gracious civility with a marked proclivity to cut anyone's throat for a dollar.44 There were compensations, of course. Always there was the weather, the scenery, and the novelty of things. In the evenings Will liked to wander down to the Puebla plaza, where, among the flowers and the fountains, he could listen to the bands playing and watch the swirl of the beautiful senoritas and resplendently attired army officers. As an accompaniment to such a fiesta one could also sip "lemonade, seltzer or other cooling drinks."45 This is the closest, in these early years, that Will ever came to disclosing the fact that cheap tequila and whisky were other attractions of the country. From the vantage point of the present day it is difficult not to hear in this description of Will's certain echoes of the visions of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Will could reasonably argue that he was in Mexico because there were prospects of making money in a region less worked over by photographers and artists. In late 1889 he remained convinced that he would leave the country with "lots of big Mexican dollars."46 What was entirely in the air, and changing practically week to week, were his future travel plans. One possibility that he perhaps favoured over any other was to stop over in Cuba and the West Indies on his way back to visit his family. At other times he mentioned the attractions of pursuing his business in South America or even of staying in Mexico for a much longer time. The truth was, as he himself put it, "my plans are all upside down and I don't really know what I may do."47 In fact what Will did was to take the long steamer voyage to the Yucatan peninsula. He had decided that he would heed his father's entreaties to return to Canada, but not before making one last effort to accumulate some savings. He worked extremely hard in the

129 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave"

scorching sun, painting small portraits, with the result that he realized $1,500, which he then converted into American gold. He also had the promise of a free voyage to New York from an English captain with whom he had become acquainted in Vera Cruz. On a Saturday he headed for the port but was confronted with such a ferocious storm that it was not possible to board the ship. As a result, as he recounted to his father in a letter in 1890: I got a room at one of the miserable places they call hotels, and before night was sick ... with chills & fever. Sunday afternoon I was no better, and two Americans whom I had seen ... shortly before and had spoken to several times, called in to see me. One who claimed to be a cattle man from Texas, David Slaughter, said he had lost nearly all his money in that business ... the other, Henry Clemens said he had at one time been Editor & proprietor of the Raton Rouge in New Mexico. Troubles with his wife led him to drink, he had lost everything & was going with Slaughter to Spanish Honduras. Both had an appearance of being what they said they were. They asked me if they could do anything for me, I said no unless they could find some strong coffee some place and send it to me. They left and in half an hour an Indian boy brought me an earth bowl of coffee ... I drank this without stopping until the last drop was gone and that drink cost me over $1,000. I woke up about 6 o'clock Monday morning and reached about the room like a drunken man ... I discovered that all the money I had in the world was a $1 mex bill and about $5 in odd coins ... I was stripped clean, my watch was gone, and one of them had even taken my hat in exchange for his own ... As I do not like people to pity me, I have told nobody about my losses.48

Once again, Will had to try strike out to make his fortune. By September 1890 Will was in New Orleans with Starkey again, although their plans of going to South America were upset by Starkey's being "sick." By early in the next year Starkey, who "is about the only man that I have met with in all my wanderings who I can look upon as my friend," had moved northwards, advising Will not to follow him as times were very "tough."49 From New Orleans Will spent the first half of 1891 meandering through Texas before moving into Kansas and Oklahoma. It was then that the crushing news of his brother's death in Queensland reached him. To his brother Dave he poured out his soul: Jack never expected to live to be an old man, and I have known for years that my time on this earth will not spin out to anything like the average of a man's life. I tell you this Dave, because you are now young, that you may

130 Drink in Canada not follow the examples of your elder brothers and that you may take a different road surer and safer by which to obtain success and wealth, and someday, soon very soon, our father and mother who have been so good to us always will need the support of the strong arm of a son ... [Let us hope that you will] not fail in doing your duty as I have done. I am not old in years but the way I have put in the past five, have been terribly waring on my not very strong constitution. Instead of living a quiet, easy contented life as I should, I -have done the very opposite. Great schemes, still greater disappointments. Brilliant prospects today, black despair tomorrow etc. all through, and to my mind it seems simply to prove that some men are born lucky & some are not ... Now Dave, I would like very much to see you all again and trust I will, but that hope and that ambition that possessed both Jack and I is not dead within me, when that goes I go, but if I decide to go into South America or any other far off place I will at least try to spend a short time at home before I go.5° This promise Will kept, for, as his father's diary recorded, his son returned in late December 1891 for the first time in nearly six years.51 Young George Rennie's very scrappy diary lists some marvellously happy days spent with Will fishing, boating, and walking. One night, much to George's delight, they even saw a performance of Ten Nights in a Bar Room.52 Exactly how long Will stayed in the family home is not clear, but it is certain that by April 1894 he was once more in Texas. One letter written at this time contained the far from reassuring news that he had fallen off a trestle bridge but could not remember the details of how it happened.53 As if this were an omen, the next communication was a starkly worded telegram to Dave requesting money to pay for Will's treatment at the Keeley Institute in Houston, Texas.54 Will's letter to Dave on 10 October 1894 reveals the true plight of the young man: Your letter reed, two days ago, but was not in very good condition to answer it at that time, but can do so now ... When that message was sent to you for the Fifty dollars, I was on the verge of lunacy. I had no clear idea that such a message was send or that the money came until two days afterwards. I have now been under treatment at the Keeley Institute for nearly two weeks and am now much better both mentally & physically than I have been for years and the physican in charge has since told me that my case was one of the most desperate they have ever had. ... The fifty dollars, Dave, I will return to you as quickly as I possibly can, and of course it will not take me long to save that much, now that my whisky bill will be nothing in the future, where it has at least averaged fifty dollars a month in the past.55

131 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave"

Perhaps Will's estimation of his monthly whisky bill was an exaggeration, but even an approximation to it would have purchased, quite literally, a straggering amount of booze, especially in Mexico and Texas. Even by Canadian prices, it suggests that Will was consuming a quantity approaching three quarts of whisky a day. No wonder the doctors at the Keeley Institute, hardened as they were to such cases, were appalled by his condition. It is possible that John Rennie had inwardly known or suspected for some time the origins of Will's problems. In 1890, when receiving a photograph of his son, he was taken aback by how thin Will appeared but was willing to attribute this to "chills & fever."56 But how would he react now, given his religious beliefs and detestation of drink? One immediate response was to make certain that he and Dave put together the more than one hundred dollars required to pay for the full course of treatment of four weeks. More importantly, his attitude was sympathetic, positive, optimistic, and largely devoid of moralistic content: I am distressed beyond measure to think that Will has fallen so low, but still it is of no use to sit down and lament and yet do nothing. I have confidence in the Keeley cure from what I have read & know of it, and if Will's health is not shattered otherwise, I believe he will soon be well. Of course, it is possible for him to relapse, after being cured. But it is very unlikely that he will do so. The taste or desire for liquor will be completely gone, and with the remembrance of what he had come through it is most improbable that he will expose himself to the awful danger again. He would be mad if he did. I hope he may be induced to give up his roving life and to come nearer to home and settle down in a good centre and among good society. His wandering life, & exposure to temptation at hotels etc. has been almost his ruin, and his case affords a solemn warning against tampering with the curse of strong drink ... But for drink Will might have been well off today. Instead of that he is penniless. Still there is hope for him, and we must lend him a helping hand.57

In one respect John Rennie's prayers were answered, for Will vowed that he had taken his last drink and was "totally indifferent" to alcohol in any form. He was continuing with the special tonic treatment at the institute and pledged that he would repay the money with his first receipts.58 This meant going back on the road again, which was a denial of John Rennie's other chief hope. Within a month of coming out of the institute Will was working through the small country towns of Texas. While there he was informed that his younger brother Jim was displaying certain signs of following in his brothers' footsteps. As a result Will reported that, in a letter to him,

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"I gave Jim a little talk ... about the whisky question, but as I am not very sure about him drinking I can't say very much to him. He certainly can't be in the fix I was in or he couldn't hold his job 24 hours. And if he only drinks moderately he may do as I advised him in my letter, to learn a lesson from poor Jack & myself and drop it once & forever while he can do so, for if he keeps it up, the time will come when he can't give it up."59 Ominously, even while this letter was being written, Will was being drawn once more towards Mexico. By early 1895 he was back in his old haunts in Guadalajara. He admitted to his father in subsequent correspondence that he had had "a rough time of it" for a month or two, for he was still weak from having been in bed so long. By mistake he had been taken to the hospital for sick criminals, where he had to coexist with some of the roughest desperados in Mexico. Will's long lay-off had placed him in financial difficulty, but he was confident that he would soon right the balance. He assured his father that he was not having any trouble with "the liquor question," even though "whisky or its equivalent is almost as cheap as water in Mexico." His final word was to tell his family not to worry about any future breaks in his correspondence.60 This advice was difficult to follow. His brother Dave, who was establishing himself in the milling business near Sarnia, tried to get Will to look at his life differently. Dave said that while he had been taking out a life insurance policy, he noticed that the rates would double if he chose to reside where Will did: It would seem from this that southern latitudes are considered very unhealthy for northerners. I have no doubt such is the case. And Mexico is besides, from all reports, a half heathenish country where life is very lightly considered. But you have doubtless considered the risk you are running and think the prize is worth it. Or perhaps you do not value very highly your life. I guess most of us do at times get weary of life but the fault is doubtless our own. Life is all right. There is no end to its possibilities. If we weary of it, if it grows monotonous, it is because we are not advancing.61

The gap between the way Dave and Will viewed the world and its prospects was as great as the miles between them. Will moved to Puebla in the summer of 1895. His letters by now were disjointed, abrupt, and sloppily written. Yet he could still get excited by the thought of making a quick dollar through the commercial exploitation of onyx, a marble capable of very high polish. So far as his health was concerned, the news was hardly comforting. He was, he said, "feeling pretty well, but not quite so well as I

133 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave"

would like to feel."62 It was not long after this that the desperate telegrams to his father and brother were sent that triggered off John Rennie's train journey southwards. It was on the train from Texarkana to Laredo that a conductor handed John a telegram with the devastating news that Will had died in Houston, Texas, the previous day.63 Once back in Canada, John Rennie received several letters that added further details of Will's final trials, especially his repeated efforts to break free of his addiction. One was from the Reverend John Rowland in Guadalajara. He had first met Rennie's son when an American dentist came to him saying that Will had appealed to him for help. Before Howland could act, however, Will had gone to the police, which was the reason he had ended up in the criminal hospital. Howland was confident that Will had been skilfully treated, for if there was one disease that Mexican doctors understood, it was alcoholism. Upon his release Will had visited the Howland home frequently, from which Howland came to appreciate how anxious Will was to reform, so as to save his family from anxiety. Unfortunately, he had formed a partnership in the photography business with a young American who promptly decamped with all the money. Then Will fell in with a "Mr. Trailler, a good-hearted fellow, but visionary and unsuccessful. Your son took him in with him in the business of colouring photographs and Trailler gave him lodging and what he most needed, constant companionship." This arrangement lasted until Will left for Puebla in the employment of a bookselling business. In summing up his feelings about Will, Howland wrote: It is painful to see the effect of Mexico on many who come here. The climate is magnificent and the air delightfully soft and balmy, but it seems to produce a kind of moral and spiritual intoxication. Few are able to resist it or even break away from it and we have been called to witness many sad scenes. But your son showed the effect of his birth and training. Although possessed by a roving spirit and made a victim by the habit of drink, he retained his spiritual sensibilities to an unusual degree, and was always easily touched. He also never lost his moral strength entirely and during the months he spent here, I am quite certain that he refrained entirely from all kinds of liquor, though they are sold everywhere here and the tequila has a most persuasive and seductive fragrance.64

The most informative letter came from a friend of Will's in Puebla called Charles Bresler, who was in the picture-enlargement busi-

134 Drink in Canada

ness. They had met on a train from Mexico City, and shortly thereafter Will asked for Bresler's aid in overcoming his drink problem. According to Bresler, I told him if he would place himself under my direction & follow my advice I would have him soon restored, so we began the experiment at once; took him to his room & placed him in bed and cut of [f] everything pertaining to spirituous liquids, it was of course rather a hard course for him to go through with, but he made a manful & heroic effort and came out [the] winner apparantly; his appetite and sleep were almost fully restored. Then he made a trip to Atlixco for the book firm remaining several days & it was then he had to place himself under the doctors care; it was less than a week ... Upon his return he at once came to me & begged me to take care of him, and again he was in [care] about ten days; I mention this only to show you his repeated efforts to control himself.

Bresler's final words were that he had never met a more "kindhearted" or "generous & sensitive" person than Will Rennie.65 The question that looms so large and that one is left to ponder endlessly is how such a man as this could have destroyed himself so ruthlessly. JAMES A. RENNIE

In this section we will follow the struggles of John Rennie's third son, Jim, with problems of employment and alcoholism. In 1884, after a fire caused the collapse of the London business that John Rennie had arranged for Will and Jim, the latter spent a month in Detroit looking unsuccessfully for a job.66 It was a measure of his desperation that for a short while he even sold newspapers on trains out of Stratford going to Buffalo.67 Finally, in 1885, much to his own and his father's relief, Jim managed to secure employment in a store in Toronto. But John Rennie found another cause for worry in his son's thin and tired appearance, which he attributed to the long hours spent working indoors.68 This kind of monotonous existence Jim endured for five years before making the momentous move in the summer of 1890 to Chicago, where he "obtained a situation at good wages" in a hat and fur store. Within a few months Jim transferred to the giant department store Marshall Field. Whatever his pay was now did not prevent Jim from being very "hard up,"69 a state of affairs not helped by his having to miss a week's work due to rheumatism.70 In fact, almost from the moment he moved to Chicago his father expressed

135 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave"

concern about Jim's frequent sicknesses and weak constitution.71 Then came a calamitous bout of typhoid pneumonia, which Jim barely survived and which necessitated a hurried trip to his bedside by his father.72 Will's disclosure that he had despatched his friend Starkey to "cheer up" Jim73 cannot but have caused some concern over what form the cheer might have taken. At any rate, Jim recovered his health and remained in Chicago. Of all the places in the northern part of the continent to which Jim might have gone, Chicago, from the perspective of a potential drinker, was undoubtedly the worst. The multiplicity of drinking establishments owed much to the intense rivalry among brewers and to an extreme laissez-faire attitude on the part of the licensing authorities. In the "Loop" district the saloons catered to the many low-paid employees of the ever-multiplying department stores. The hopes for upward mobility of these legions of clerks were often mocked by the narrowness of their social lives as well as the claustrophobic atmosphere of their dingy rooms, to which they dragged themselves each evening after many servile hours behind the counter. Chicago has been called "a city of strangers," from which for many of its inhabitants the ubiquitous saloon became the easiest avenue of escape.74 Jim had not been in Chicago very long before his brother Dave began to pick up danger signals that Jim was getting caught up in the saloon life. To the advice Dave gave, Jim did not respond well. With a degree of truculence he challenged his brother, who was not a teetotaller, to see which of them could get through the next year without a drink. The date of the letter, 25 December 1893, could hardly be more significant, for in other passages the message reverberates with the cry of the loneliness of the big city: "This is Christmas day and a very Blue Christmas it is to be for me. This morning I worked until twelve o'clock our usual hour on holidays but the balance of the day I have nothing to do. No one has seen fit to invite me to a Christmas dinner. I have no place to go and I feel very much like an orphan."73 Very generously in the following year Jim did contribute ten dollars towards the costs of Will's recovery in Houston, in return for which he got another fraternal warning on the dangers of intemperance.76 One marked difference between Jim Rennie and his two older brothers was that he was close enough to home to spend his summer holidays with his family. Unlike them also, Jim was willing to contemplate a return there if his life became too unbearable. In early 1896 the family received several reports from Jim that he was not feeling well and that he had had to take time off from work.77 It was

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Jim himself, after such ill health and absenteeism persisted, who proposed to return home.78 After considerable indecision, he decided in the end to stay on in Chicago, where his problems at work immediately got worse. Finally, after what he reported as a case of jaundice in November 1897, he decided that the time had come to join the family in Manitowaning,79 where he stayed until March 1898. Then, supplied with eighty dollars, of which Dave had given fifty, he set out for Chicago to look for work.80 Within a fortnight Dave received two more urgent requests for money from Jim, the second of which said that he needed fifteen dollars or he would be in a "bad fix."81 By now John Rennie was alarmed at the amount of money Jim was requiring.82 He set out to find why. His inquiries revealed that Jim, on his way to Chicago, had stopped off in Toronto, where he had gone on a binge of several days that cost him all his initial supply of money. John Rennie further discovered that Jim had been "indulging since he got there and is in a bad way. The conclusion I have come to is that Jim has lost control of himself. It nearly breaks my heart."83 Once more John Rennie had to make the long trek to Illinois, where he stayed with his son for over a week. In the autumn of 1898 Jim tried a new line of work, this time with a publisher delivering books and collecting accounts. Very discouraged, and not liking the job, he went on another spree in the latter part of November. His condition became so desperate that he eventually sought admission to the Washingtonian Home for Inebriates. The Washingtonians had been organized since the 18305; their general attitude and approach to addiction were precursors of the techniques adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous a century later. Jim underwent treatment for a month, at which point he left and took a job selling brushes on a door-to-door commission basis. Telling his father that he had made a considerable number of sales but had to await the arrival of his commissions, he requested the loan of twenty-five dollars to help tide him over. But even before the money arrived, Jim was off the rails again, so this fresh injection merely allowed him to continue his binge. In the circumstances, he was more than a little fortunate to be able to regain admission to the Washingtonian Home for a fortnight. While recuperating he wrote a letter that, according to his father, was "a more penitent and frank acknowledgement than I have got from him before. But I am sorely perplexed what to do. I am of course most anxious to save Jim if it is possible. I cannot endure the thought of letting him go down to a drunkard's grave if it can be prevented."84

137 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave"

In the summer of 1899, whether wisely or not, Jim returned to the road selling brushes in the northern United States. Ever hopeful, John Rennie reported to Dave, who was helping to support his brother, that Jim "finds the drudgery of canvassing & carrying round his heavy valise of samples rather hard work especially in the hot weather and he complains in the last two letters of being very tired. His expenses are considerable so he has as yet not been able to get ahead. But I believe he has kept entirely clear of liquor, and if his health does not break down I believe he will in time do well."85 Rarely can a prognosis have been so quickly disproved. By January and February 1900, always cruel months for Jim Rennie, he was "hitting the bottle" again with a vengeance. He sank into such a state of disrepair that he was put into hospital in Covington, Kentucky, for ten days. Then, repeating a familiar pattern, he was no sooner released than he suffered a relapse. On both occasions George was the one who went to look after him. By now John Rennie was having to shoulder the expenses alone, as Dave's patience had gone beyond the breaking point.86 Once Jim was restored to some semblance of health, George accompanied him to Chicago, where, they decided, his best hopes for work lay.87 In December 1902 Jim appeared unannounced at the door of his parents' home in a demoralized and impoverished state. Except for the clothes he was wearing, he had pawned everything of value, including his valise and trunk.88 After helping him to recuperate, his father accompanied him to Chicago, where he helped to make arrangements for Jim's employment. There, for a decade at least, Jim was to have intermittent problems with alcoholism. Then in 1912 John Rennie received a letter from a Chicago store owner named Henry Paul: "Your son James comes in to see me quite often and is looking very well. He is employed by us every Saturday as an extra salesman and does well. My object in writing you is to inform you of his doings and he is a changed man and it certainly is a great pleasure to me to be able to write you these good words."89 As the years went by, there were signs that Jim, while never at all well off, had some cash to spare. It must have given him great satisfaction in 1925 to send Mary fifty dollars, which he wanted to have passed on to Dave's son. The following year he began to dabble in the real estate market in Chicago.90 Unfortunately, however, this relative affluence lasted a preciously short period of time before Jim suffered a collapse in his health in early 1929. He returned to Sarnia to be looked after by Mary. While he was there, hardly a week went by when there was not some letter or card from

138 Drink in Canada

Henry Paul or his family in Chicago. Paul's aged mother recalled how John Rennie had once begged her son not to forsake Jim. Not only had he not done so, she wrote to Jim, but now "he can hardly speak of you without showing his kind feelings that [have] lasted all these years."91 Jim Rennie was unable to make any recovery, and he died on 31 March 1929 at the age of sixty.

" W H A T T O D O W I T H Y O U R B O Y ..." The Reverend John Rennie retired from the ministry in 1902 and moved with his wife and daughter, Mary, to Sarnia to be near his son Dave. It was now possible for him to attend special events in the Ailsa Craig area, such as the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Carlisle church, at which he took an honoured place in 1908.92 In December 1915 he could take pride in the fact that Dave was ordained as an elder in Sarnia's St Andrews Presbyterian church. Dave had for some time played a prominent part in the Sunday school of the church. In November 1916 John Rennie passed away, having reached the age of eighty-seven and outlived his wife by nine years. Mary, who carefully attended to and treasured family papers and memories, died in 1944 at the age of eighty-one. The most pressing and persistent question arising from this study is why John and Ann Rennie had to suffer so disastrously from the problem of alcoholism within the family. After all, the injunction of the Reverend Ormiston in his pastoral letter of 1869 to raise one's children within an environment of total abstinence had been part of the family code from the beginning. Nor could it be said - judging at least from his letters - that John Rennie was the sort of overbearing person who continually directed religious homilies at his children. One of the few exceptions was a letter to Jack in 1890, wherein John advised his son to look to Jesus, "a never failing friend."93 His strictures on drink were usually confined to letters written to the two sons who were not problem drinkers. It is possible, though it must remain speculative, that Ann Rennie's worries and ill health could spill over into a form of nagging. But, without being flippant about it, this would not have made the Rennie household unique or provided any special cause for rebellious anger on the part of its members. The Rennie home, of course, was part of a wider community in which influences both Scottish and Canadian condoned and enjoined the imbibing of alcohol. The Rennie boys grew up at a time when this culture, which upheld the manly qualities of good, hard drinking, was locked in mortal combat with a rising temperance movement, which vilified all forms of liquor consumption - especial-

John and Mary Rennie. Standing: David Rennie and wife.

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\y moderate drinking, for the harm it did in establishing a model of social acceptability. There was thus a narrowing of the middle ground, which to a young man might appear to force a choice between the calculated safety of perpetual sobriety or the exciting risks of occasional binges. Growing up in a totally abstaining family could also have enhanced the attractiveness of the forbidden article. Studies done on this question reveal that, although few drinkers come from such environments, those who do deviate develop signs of alcoholism much more rapidly than others.94 Another possibility is that peer pressure exerted upon children brought up in families of the moral establishment can lead to various forms of social deviation. What might give greater substance to this point, but is clearly lacking in our three case studies, is the sense of any alienation between the sons and the father or family. Will in particular showed genuine signs of remorse for his conduct and was extremely anxious to make certain that Dave would play the role of the eldest son. Neither Will nor Jim, on occasions when they returned home, ever gave any sign of rebelling against the family code of total abstinence. Mary, for example, when observing in 1900 the troubled state that Jim was in, could not but reflect with amazement on the fact that during his previous, and lengthy, return there were no signs indicating the true nature of his difficulties.95 There is little evidence either that any of the boys suffered a crisis of faith as such. It is probably true that Jack, and possibly Will as well, drifted into a kind of religious limbo, but nothing would indicate that there was any crucial turning-point in the process. Researchers have found it difficult to categorize the causes of alcoholism. Disentangling cause and effect is very problematical. For example, anxiety is often cited as a reason for problem drinking, but this overlooks the fact that tension itself can be the product of excessive drinking. The inherent difficulty in attempting any kind of generalization has led to the statement that "there are as many routes to alcoholism as there are alcoholics."96 There will be little predictive value in placing reliance solely upon any one approach, whether it be personality disorders or socio-cultural factors. Nevertheless, in the studies of the three individuals before us, there are elements common to all, and others that were unique to the individual. First, and most obviously, all three young men not only moved away from home but also outside their country of birth. For extended periods of time they situated themselves, with almost classic precision, in social and geographical trouble-spots. Their transience weakened the slight hold that traditional sources of social control

141 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave"

could exert over them. A hotel is not a home. One of the first letters Jack wrote after graduation was from a hotel in Bay City, Michigan, which, on its letterhead, advertised its choice wines, liquors, and cigars.97 The sense of detachment from homeland was most explicit with Will, who became completely converted by the climate and people of the southern United States. Of course, for Dave and George, remaining in Canada was no guarantee of immunity from the problems of their brothers, but it did mean that they operated within sight of familiar moral landmarks and closer to other family members. John Rennie, fully cognizant of the dangers involved, warned Dave in 1894, when he was temporarily unemployed, against going to the United States. "We have too many boys there already,"98 he wrote, with some feeling. In moving away, Jim was simply attempting to make a living, while Jack and Will were more dramatically seeking their fortunes, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. With time, wanderlust came to be mixed in with ambition. Moving from one town to the next, initially in the hope that one's dreams would be fulfilled, became an end in itself. Each new location offered the hope of burying past failures and starting afresh. Forward planning became not much more than consulting a train schedule. It must also be remembered that at this time Jack and Will were part of a shifting army of young men who moved about freely within a system of porous national boundaries. With the clogging up of opportunity at the centre, men rushed to take their chances on the frontier. How many anxious Canadian parents there must have been, like the Kennies, who paid special attention to articles in the press on the subject of "What to do with your Boy or Girl."99 Research on alcoholism has shown that it can, to an extent, run in families. Jack's difficulties with drink almost certainly rubbed off on Will and perhaps on Jim as well. Moreover, Jack had been given an expensive education, the natural expectation being that he could then help out with the education of his younger siblings. This never materialized. Jack, while having pretensions to grandeur, had few of the entrepreneurial skills that were necessary to make a success of medicine in the late nineteenth century. In addition he displayed strong dependency tendencies by constantly attaching himself to those who would tell him where to go and what to do next. His drinking could have been part and parcel of the same syndrome. Excessive drinking can be a means by which the individual forces others to take responsibility for him. 10° Common to all three sufferers was a record of poor health in their younger years. The death of Annie in 1885 from consumption seems

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to have cast a suggestive pallor over Jack and Will. That Jack too was in the grip of the disease is hardly in doubt. Why then continue the frenetic lifestyle he had adopted? It is in answering these questions that the circumstantial evidence for Jack's having a serious drinking problem is most persuasive, for what becomes impaired in such an individual is the ability to see with any degree of clarity the consequences of his own actions.101 Or, if at times he does, he is unable to gain enough mastery over himself to overthrow long-established habits. Driven on by the guilty conviction that he owed something to his family, Jack raced against time but, with each succeeding year, became more and more convinced that life was conspiring against him. Thus consumption opened the gates to alcoholism, and Jack's fate was sealed. A noteworthy absence in the lives of the three young men was female companionship. Only the two sons who remained in Canada married or had families. The other three were immersed in the society of young males, the part of the population most at risk of encountering problems with drink. There is, however, a qualification necessary with regard to Jack. The escapade in Dunedin would suggest some kind of liaison with a woman. Also, after Jack's death Will wrote a letter to a lady in Bay City "who was very kind to Jack when he was sick there and who helped him in many ways."102 Such examples suggest that Jack retained some connection with women. Such was not the case with Jim or Will. Not only did the latter's business usually require the services of a photographer as a travelling companion, but his location in the west legitimized male mateship of the frontier type. Yet against all this, Will was constantly searching for a deeper and more meaningful relationship than such characteristically episodic and momentary partnerships. Embedded within this desire may have been a more than latent homosexuality. If this were so, then it would have added an extra ingredient to his dislike of Ontario and its puritanical mores. Of all the sons, it was Will who knew that he could never go home again. The way he led his life constituted a plea for release from his travails. Social and economic conditions prevailing in North America in the late nineteenth century are central to any explanation of Jim's frequent breakdowns. His sprees were less existentially motivated and more in the nature of finding solace within a harsh socioeconomic climate. A young man with little training and no capital, Jim also had to face up to the humiliations of downward social mobility, although he did cling stubbornly to the last desperate rung of respectability. Yet, even allowing for the anomic environment of

143 "The spectre of a drunkard's grave"

Chicago, the challenges Jim faced were not so different from those that George lived with. Instinctively, Jim's family sensed in him weaknesses of character and personality that often made sympathy more difficult to extend. However strong Jim's feelings of inadequacy or self-pity, the reasons for his troubles always appeared more prosaic than those of his brothers. Unlike them, too, he had enough of a sense of self-preservation to know when it was necessary to return home. Not for him the artistic flourishes with which Will closed out his life of self-destruction. John Rennie gave his sons in their time of trouble what they most needed - tolerance and a willingness to forgive. However trained he was in the rigours of Scottish Calvinism, he always responded generously and optimistically. It was a harsh verdict on his efforts that he should have lost two of his sons. The fact that one was saved owed much to his never-failing patience. Although the outcomes were very different, there was nothing, not even in his saddest losses, to tarnish the nobility of his life.

7 Prohibition or Regulation? The Enforcement of the Canada Temperance Act in Moncton, 1881-1896 JACQUES PAUL COUTURIER

As an area of study the prohibition of alcoholic beverages has given rise to numerous works in Canadian historiography. Yet there remain certain aspects of the prohibition phenomenon of which little is known. One of these is the way in which the various prohibition laws were enforced. To date, prohibition studies have focused, for the most part, on the political and ideological aspects of national and provincial prohibition undertakings of the turn of the century,1 emphasizing their reformist and progressive nature.2 By contrast, historians have devoted little attention except in anecdotal fashion to the actual unfolding of prohibition experiments.3 The study of the enforcement of a prohibition law is not, however, without relevance, given the nature of the measure: a penal law born of moral or social preoccupations that aims to define as criminal a mode of behaviour formerly tolerated. The result is a form of "soft" criminality, the sanction of which is largely governed by contemporary values and attitudes.4 This is particularly true of the local prohibition (also called local-option) experiments of the latter decades of the nineteenth century. From 1878, a federal law, the Canada Temperance Act (CTA), allowed the voters of a city or county to ban, by means of referendum, the sale and public consumption of alcoholic beverages.5 The prohibition of alcoholic beverages was thus a measure inspired, adopted, and enforced from within the community. For this reason an examination of the method of enforcing this prohibitive measure is of interest: it allows new light to be shed on a community's reaction to prohibition. It

145 Prohibition or Regulation?

also allows for evaluation of the nature, scope, and result of the prohibition projects from a viewpoint other than the discourse of those who favoured or opposed banning alcohol. Theoretically, the CTA should have led to the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. However, it did not bring about the desired result. In New Brunswick, for example, the law was in force in at least ten counties during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.6 In spite of this, according to the members of a royal commission of inquiry in 1895, trade in alcoholic beverages continued to be conducted quite openly in most of the zones of the province in which prohibition had been implemented: "The Scott Act [the CTA], although in force over a large portion of the province, is in reality not enforced in most of the counties, and ... in almost every part of the province a plentiful supply is to be had by those who desire to get it."7 This failure of local prohibition efforts in the Maritimes has already been noted by historians of prohibition,8 and yet we lack a full understanding of the reasons for the inefficiency of the prohibitive law. In the opinion of the members of the Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic, for example, the success of prohibition experiments depended on the extent of community backing of the law, which needed the active and continuous support of the majority in order to work.9 However, this global explanation cannot entirely account for the failure of local prohibition efforts. Other factors, more directly associated with the enforcement of the CTA, also had an impact on the unfolding and outcome of local-option experiments. In this respect, the attitudes and conduct of two groups, the prohibitionists and the alcohol retailers, seem to have played a major role. The very quality of the support of the former and the degree of resistance by the latter seem to have influenced the enforcement of the temperance law. Furthermore, financial considerations should not be overlooked, since they may affect the way in which the law is enforced, as well as determine the degree to which it is resisted. Moncton is a good setting in which to study the development of a local experiment in prohibition. Throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century this small town on the banks of the Petitcodiac River in southeastern New Brunswick was shaken by major social and economic changes, whith contemporaries generally associated with problems arising from the sale and consumption of alcohol. As a pivotal centre of railway traffic in the Maritimes, Moncton experienced feverish economic activity during the i88os under the umbrella of John A. Macdonald's National Policy. New industries such as a cotton mill, a sugar refinery, and a few foundries dotted

146 Drink in Canada

the urban landscape and attracted migrants from the countryside.I0 The population increased rapidly from 5,032 inhabitants in 1881 to 8,762 in 1891. At the same time the Acadian presence became more significant. The Acadian population grew by almost one thousand in ten years, reaching 1,274, or 14.5 per cent of the total population, in 1891." Furthermore, Moncton could not escape, during the final decades of the last century, continental preoccupations with matters concerning temperance and prohibition. The major temperance organizations found in North America were also active in Moncton. At the forefront of the battle against alcohol were the Moncton and Intercolonial Railway chapters of the Sons of Temperance and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.12 These organizations recruited members from every segment of the urban population, with the exception of the Acadian populace.13 Animated mainly by representatives of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, the Monctonian temperance movement asked for and got a referendum on local prohibition in 1879, in which the townspeople clearly opted for a ban on alcoholic beverages. The CTA was to remain in force in Moncton until the implementation of provincial prohibition in 1917, despite many efforts to repeal it. Although it apparently received lukewarm support from the Acadian electorate, the CTA was the choice of most electors who went to the polls. More than three-quarters of those who voted in the five referendums organized before 1900 opted for prohibition.14 However, despite this significant and repeated commitment to local prohibition, trade in alcohol continued within the city limits. As a travelling Toronto journalist reported in 1884, "Moncton is the chief center of the liquor interest in Westmorland [county] and a veritable free-whisky paradise."15 A decade later a member of the Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic would note that "in the city of Moncton, ... the law is admittedly more violated than in any other place in New Brunswick."16 Moreover, according to contemporaries, there were some ten to fifteen bars in operation in 1892.17 Thus Moncton was, paradoxically, a prohibitionist town in which the liquor trade continued to flourish. Many factors account for this situation. In the first instance, the CTA was neither easy to implement nor without difficulties in its enforcement. It was at times ambiguous and full of loopholes. But beyond the purely technical problems, another more fundamental element explains the continuance of the liquor trade in Moncton: the change in the very function of the law. After a few years of often laborious attempts at enforcement, the law itself was no longer really used with the aim of eliminating the alcohol trade, but rather as a tool to regulate its course and, incidentally, to raise civic revenues. To a large extent, this trans-

147 Prohibition or Regulation?

formation of the role of the law explains why the sale of alcohol continued while the city was officially subject to the CTA. The Scott Act officially came into effect in Moncton at the end of January 1881. From this date, the sale and public consumption of alcoholic beverages was banned. Any breach of the law could result in fines of fifty or one hundred dollars, or a maximum of two months' imprisonment. All cases were to be heard by the municipal police court, which was and would remain for the rest of this period under the direction of Jacob Wortman, an avowed Scott Act partisan.18 Unfortunately, there is no surviving record of police court proceedings for the period. The only cases documented are those that were examined on appeal by the provincial Supreme Court.19 Judicial statistics on CTA violations have to be reconstructed using local newspapers.20 This procedure is not without its shortcomings. It leads in particular to an underestimation of the number of violations, since newspapers did not report all indictment proceedings and did not follow reported proceedings up to the end. Nevertheless, these reconstructed statistics do give us a reasonable idea of the different stages of judicial activity generated by the Scott Act.21 Only a few cases of illegal alcohol sales appear to have been brought to the attention of the Moncton police court through the course of the first years of the prohibition regime. There were 3 charges laid in 1881, and 5 in 1882 (see Figure i). Even in 1884, when 24 charges were recorded, only 9 resulted in the conviction of the accused. Not until 1886 did the number of indictments and convictions increase significantly, with 32 indictments and 25 convictions for the year. This level of judicial activity would be sustained until 1896. We may thus distinguish between two periods of legal activity: first, a period from 1881 to 1885, with an annual average of 10 accusations and 3.8 convictions; and second, a period from 1886 to 1896, in which the annual average rose to 54.5 indictments and 34.7 convictions. Given the nature of the law, the rise in indictments and convictions should be attributed more to the efforts of the police, the court, and the community at large to enforce prohibition in a more effective manner than to an actual increase in the number of infractions committed.22 The implementation and enforcement of the prohibition law in Moncton thus appears to have occurred in two separate stages, the first, one of hesitation, punctuated by unsuccessful attempts at implementation; and the second, one of more sustained enforcement, characterized by the involvement of both a citizen's committee and the town council. When the law took effect in January 1881, the town's prohibitionist forces immediately acted to secure public compliance. A citizen's committee was set up to ensure that charges were laid against

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offenders. In addition, it was resolved at the citizen's annual meeting that a police officer should be hired for the specific purpose of overseeing the enforcement of the law.23 Yet the CTA was already the target of criticism. For example, the Moncton Times' editorialist doubted not only its judicial validity but also whether it was enforceable: "It is said to be likely that the liquor interest will fight to the utmost any prosecutions that may be started ... a good many are coming to the conclusion that if the act is not in force in the town, or cannot be enforced, it would be better to be done with the farce."24 Indeed, between 1881 and 1885 the prohibition law proved

difficult to implement, mainly because of legal opposition from alcohol retailers and prohibition opponents, and because of hesitation on the part of the prohibitionists and municipal authorities. From the very first prohibitionist interventions, the process of enforcement got bogged down. The only retailer to be convicted in 1881 appealed his case to the provincial Supreme Court, arguing that the law was not valid in Moncton.25 His lawyer argued that a separate referendum should have been held, since Moncton was a "city" under the terms of the act. This created a great deal of doubt about the validity of the CTA and caused the cessation of enforcement efforts. Later, the Supreme Court of New Brunswick quashed the dealer's conviction on the grounds of a procedural flaw related to the date on which the law came into effect in Moncton, but avoided ruling on the fundamental substance of the defence's arguments. "It so happens," noted the Times, "that no man living knows what the law is except for their Honors of the Supreme Court - and they won't tell."26 The legal imbroglio began to subside in 1882, the year during which the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled that the CTA was intra vires of the Canadian Parliament, thus putting an end to the legal challenge initiated by a Fredericton alcohol retailer.27 As for the validity of the law in Moncton, it was indirectly confirmed in the following year when the provincial Supreme Court ruled that another New Brunswick town, Milltown, could not be considered a city under the terms of the act. This was seen by Monctonians as a confirmation of the validity of the CTA in their town.28 Still, one major problem remained: no party had been clearly designated by the legislator to be responsible for the implementation of the law. The act stated that legal action could be initiated by the collector of inland revenue or by any private party. However, there was no representative of the collector of inland revenue in Moncton in the early i88os. As for concerned citizens, they were reluctant to intervene, fearful of being prosecuted for false accusa-

149 Prohibition or Regulation? Figure i Indictments and Convictions for CTA Violations, 1881-96

Source: Moncton Daily Times, 1881-95; Moncton Daily Transcript, 1896.

tions.29 In the end the prohibitionists and the town council in turn shared responsibility for enforcement between 1881 and 1884, neither one assuming it entirely. Their reluctance had mainly to do with financial considerations: it was feared that efforts to enforce the law would be costly.30 This problem, however, was temporarily resolved in 1884. Within the context of a "licence law" the federal government appointed an inspector charged with ensuring compliance with the CTA. All financial and legal responsibilities were thus assumed by the federal government, the town having only to instruct its peace officers to collaborate with the licence inspector.31 This new arrangement appeared to achieve better results. For the first time since 1881 the law was enforced in a sustained manner over several months. Between June 1884 and January 1885, accord ing to the federal inspector, some thirty cases of illegal sale of alcohol were acted upon.32 However, this initiative was short-lived and ground to a halt by February 1885 because of doubts surrounding the legality of federal involvement. A few months later the federal government suspended the enforcement of the licence law, after it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada.33 The collection of fines constituted another obstacle to the implementation of the Scott Act. Were the fines to be collected by the

150 Drink in Canada

federal government or by the various municipal authorities? Contemporaries envisaged both options. On the one hand, because the CTA was a federal law, the fines could be channelled into the federal treasury. On the other, by virtue of provincial regulations concerning summary convictions, fine revenues could also be directed to the county or municipality concerned.34 Early on, the police magistrate and the chief of police in Moncton were openly determined to see the money channelled into the municipal treasury. The Times reported : "The Police Magistrate of Moncton and the Town Marshall are both of the opinion, however, that if any fines are collected in Moncton, the money will not go to Ottawa, unless the Ottawa authorities send after it with a shotgun and compel its restauration."35 However, this problem would not surface until 1885, when the first fine was paid.36 The question was duly dealt with in November 1886, when the federal government awarded the revenue derived from violations of the prohibition law to the authorities responsible for its enforcement.37 Five years after the law itself took effect, Moncton's elected officials were for the first time technically assured of recovering the monies derived from fines. Questions of legality, administrative power, and leadership were the primary impediments to implementing the CTA in Moncton. Adopted in 1879 and effective in 1881, the law would not really be enforced until 1886. Certainly the obstacles facing the local prohibitionists and municipal authorities were many, and at times not easily surmountable. But in towns like Fredericton and Charlottetown, such obstacles did not prevent the carrying out of what was an apparently more vigorous and sustained enforcement of the law even though these efforts did not necessarily bring about an end to the liquor business.38 We may thus question the willingness of the community of Moncton to live at all cost under prohibition. It is important to note that while casting their ballots in favour of local prohibition, voters refused to concede the leadership of the town to prohibitionists in the 1881 and 1884 civic elections.39 The liquor trade, meanwhile, continued to flourish, as suggested by a Saint John daily: "Practically, the Scott Act is a dead letter in Moncton, liquor is now more openly sold than ever before. Everyday and every night in the week, Sunday included, the bars stand invitingly open, and the police well know it too, for they ... can get a 'gum tickler when they want/"40 By the latter months of 1886 the major problems impeding the implementation of the CTA were resolved. Nevertheless, the town council hesitated in assuming the responsibility of enforcing prohibition for fear of the costs involved. It was the prohibitionists who, at first, bore the financial risks involved in convicting alcohol retail-

151 Prohibition or Regulation?

ers. In August 1886, at the instigation of the Sons of Temperance, the prohibitionists formed a legal action committee, the United Temperance Committee, to enforce the liquor law. This committee assembled representatives from the Sons of Temperance, the Temple of Honour and Temperance, and from the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches.41 Though initiated by the Sons of Temperance, the committee was to be autonomous. Its leading members were the Reverend W.B. Wiggins of the Reformed Baptist Church, secretary; the Reverend W.B. Hinson of the First Baptist Church, member of the executive; businessman Jonathan Weir, president; and lawyer David Grant, who acted as prosecutor. The committee received donations from sixteen prohibitionists totalling $450 in order to start its activities. These contributors came from various professional backgrounds: of the sixteen, there were four ecclesiastics, two merchants, a few employees of the Intercolonial Railway, a tinsmith, and a labourer.42 Members also came from diverse ethnic backgrounds. "The committee is a strong one," noted one of the members, the Reverend R.S. Crisp, "representing English, Scotch and Irish."43 The Acadians, however, were not there. They were absent both from the major prohibitionist organizations and from the committee responsible for enforcing prohibition. After the establishment of the United Temperance Committee, its members and town councillors decided to take joint action. The latter charged the chief of police with the enforcement of the law, while the committee agreed to take charge of the legal proceedings and to bear the related costs. As for the fines, they were to be collected by the town and then handed over to the committee by way of compensation.44 This collaboration was praised by Mayor D. A. Duffy at the end of 1886. While nothing the town council's firm resolve to enforce the law, he quickly stressed that the formula of enforcement was a good one since the municipality incurred no supplementary costs: "I, as your Chief Magistrate, have taken a decided stand against violators of this law, and, with the assistance of the United Temperance Committee, a number of prosecutions have been made, and suites carried on, without any expense to the taxpayers, the costs being paid by private subscription. The fear that many have had, and still may have, in regard to plunging the town in costs of thousands of dollars by the Scott Act prosecutions is groundless. The penalties to be paid by violators are ample to meet all costs incurred, and pay a dividend on the investment."45 The involvement of the Temperance Committee, in league with the municipal police, led to increased judicial activity. Thus, according to newspaper accounts, there were 32 cases of illegal alcohol

152 Drink in Canada

Carrying out the Canada Temperance Act in Moncton in 1907. While the rest of the police force watches, Sergeant Duncan Munn empties a barrel of contraband alcohol. Moncton Museum Collection

sales in 1886 and 57 in 1887. In the following year 45 offences were judged by the police magistrate. Convictions numbered 25 in 1886, 32 in 1887, and 28 in 1888. *6 Compared to the previous period, the success rate of prosecutions also rose, climbing from 38 per cent between 1881 and 1885 to 64 per cent in the years 1886 to 1888. None the less, in November 1888 the United Temperance Committee decided to cease its activities, and disbanded. According to its executive, responsibility for the enforcement of prohibition should be assumed by the town: "[We believe] that the enforcement of the Canada Temperance Act rests with the Town Council, the same as for the laws of the Dominion or Town Ordinances."47 In December 1888, after years of indecision, the elected town officials finally decided to resume enforcement in the wake of the nowdefunct temperance committee.48 The town's intervention did not bring about a downturn in judicial activity. It remained high and at times even peaked, with a record 78 indictments in 1890 and 42 con-

153 Prohibition or Regulation?

Jonathan Weir, a prominent businessmen, chaired the United Temperance Committee in 1886. The committee tried to enforce the act between 1886 and 1888. Moncton Museum Collection

victions in 1893. The success rate, moreover, remained fairly stable. About 64 per cent of all cases resulted in guilty verdicts. The town's work, however, was not unanimously accepted and often drew criticism from such prohibitionist factions as the Evangelical Alliance

154 Drink in Canada

Ferdinand Thibodeau was the first police chief of the town of Moncton. Later he became involved in the liquor trade. Moncton Museum Collection

and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, who demanded increased firmness on the part of the authorities in their enforcement of the law.49 Just as often, town officials, such as Mayor Sumner in 1890, would simply reiterate the commitment taken in 1888: "The Scott Act is a delicate topic to touch on, but [I] would say that I feel that the present [Police] Committee have done all they could to enforce it vigorously ... The only suggestion I can make is to pursue the enforcement vigorously, without any let up, and it

155 Prohibition or Regulation?

A luxurious Moncton hotel, the Brunswick was owned by one-time city council member George McSweeney. The Brunswick had to pay several fines resulting from violations of the Canada Temperance Act. Moncton Museum Collection

must eventually lead up to success."50 This burdensome responsibility would continue to be borne by the town council until the introduction of provincial prohibition in 1917. Throughout the period from 1886 to 1896, the members of the citizens' committee and the municipal authorities encountered many obstacles in enforcing the CTA. Indeed, it was not enough simply to expose the activities of a liquor retailer in order to put a stop to his trade; this presented little difficulty, given the notoriety of sales outlets. It was also necessary to engage in legal action and to convict offenders. At this stage the prohibitionists and municipal authorities had to deal with groups often sympathetic to the cause of the liquor sellers. It thus proved difficult to obtain witnesses. Contemporaries identified this as the major difficulty in enforcing prohibition.51 Moreover, not only was it necessary to find witnesses, but they also

156 Drink in Canada

had to be convinced to testify. Some witnesses were impossible to locate; others, even if they showed up, were less than loquacious. Still others, as the Moncton Transcript noted, "[were] gifted with a remarkably bad memory."52 These difficulties suggest a certain solidarity between liquor sellers and consumers. Furthermore, the prohibitionists and municipal authorities were confronted with a police force that was often less than zealous in its enforcement of prohibition. The attitudes of the police towards the law were frequently criticized. In 1688 the Reverend W.B. Hinson, a member of the temperance committee, denounced the police chiefs inaction, while taking offence at the performance of the police force as a whole: "Do the constables run the town or are they the servants .of the people? Have they orders and commands and are they expected to obey or do they stand as dictators?"53 During a public inquiry the police were reproached for showing a lax attitude towards innkeepers and for doing little to uphold the law.54 These criticisms were taken up by Mayor McKenzie in the following year. He denounced the "lack of determined resolution to enforce the observance of this Act, or a disinclination to vigilance on the part of the police force."55 Another public inquiry, in 1890, resulted in the resignation of chief of police Ferdinand Thibodeau. Some months later, Thibodeau himself, an Acadian "de bonne taille [et] de bon poignet," became a liquor dealer.56 Though this change of status may be exceptional, it illustrates the extent to which relations between members of the police force and the liquor community were fluid. Too few and underpaid,57 the police were compelled to enforce a law upon members of a group with which they had frequent dealings and with whom they often shared the same socioeconomic conditions.58 One obstacle, the most important, remained: the resistance of the liquor community itself. It would be hazardous to try to evaluate the number of liquor dealers operating in Moncton, given the illegal nature of the trade and its illicit character. One can note, however, that about twenty individuals were charged or paid fines yearly between 1886 and 1896.59 These individuals resisted at all levels of the judicial process. During the trials, for example, the retailers' lawyers did not hesitate to exploit all the subtleties in the legal arsenal in order to have their clients acquitted or to have the charges dropped. This type of defence commonly relied on the uncovering of procedural flaws. For example, many prosecutions were never brought to completion on the grounds of errors in the issuing of warrants, the false identification of the accused, the low level of alcohol in the beverage concerned, or even family links between the

157 Prohibition or Regulation?

judge and the defendant.60 Even if found guilty, the retailer had further recourse: he could lodge an appeal before the provincial Supreme Court. About 14 per cent of all convictions handed down by the police magistrate of Moncton were thus appealed.61 Such a process allowed the accused a short-term deferral of fine payments and, in the long run, opened the door for the quashing of the previous conviction. Outside the courts another strategy was employed by the liquor community to undermine the mechanisms of law enforcement: geographic mobility. Temporary or permanent relocation often allowed the liquor sellers to avoid paying a fine or being thrown in jail. For instance, while the temperance committee was active, twenty-one liquor retailers left town, for the most part before paying their fines.62 At the same time, new dealers entered the trade, or previously convicted ones returned, thus ensuring the perpetuation of the retail liquor community.63 Ethnic and family networks made these tactics more effective and contributed to strenghtening the resistance of the liquor community, either by helping its members to "go underground" or by reinforcing its solidarity. A few outlets were apparently family ventures, involving either the wife, the brother, or the sons of the proprietor. Other outlets, notably those operated by Acadians, also appear to have been ethnic ventures that is, they were staffed mainly by members of the same ethnic group. Acadians were in fact overrepresented among convicted liquor sellers. They made up about a quarter of the group between 1886 and 1896. In 1889, for example, the year in which the Acadian presence in the liquor community was most notable, more than half of those convicted were of Acadian origin, though as a group they made up only 14.5 per cent of the town's population.64 The various tactics used by the liquor community met with a certain amount of success. They appear to have hindered the collection of fines imposed upon those convicted of selling alcohol (see Figure 2). Thousands of dollars in fines were generated locally by the enforcement of the Canada Temperance Act between 1886 and 1896. Amounts varied from year to year, from a low of $1,250 in 1886 to a high of $2,450 in 1893. Yet many fines remained unpaid.65 Each year, according to the town's financial records, the sum collected under the CTA was less than it should have been, except in 1889 and 1893. The deficit fluctuated yearly: for example, it amounted to $1,100 in 1887 but only $100 in 1891. Overall, about 20 per cent of all fines imposed on the convicted liquor dealers were left unpaid. Between 1886 and 1896 the enforcement of the CTA led to many indictments, frequent convictions, and the imposing of thousands

158 Drink in Canada

of dollars' worth of fines. At first glance this period seems quite homogeneous, despite the intervention of two different authorities. The level of judicial activity related to the enforcement of the law varied little, in terms of either the total number of indictments or the number of convictions. However, the United Temperance Committee and the Moncton town council may not have had the same approach to the enforcement of the Scott Act. There seems to have been a qualitative difference between the two, both in the type of charges laid and in the methods used to bring the judicial process to term. Indeed, the citizens' committee generally appears to have been more determined than the municipal authorities to see prohibition enforced, and that greater determination was evident from the very outset of the legal proceedings. To secure witnesses the committee often employed unorthodox methods. It paid individuals, for example, to visit liquor retailers and consume liquor in order to testify against them later. This tactic was occasionally used between 1886 and 1888. Moreover, on the initiative of the committee's lawyer, witnesses were imprisoned to guarantee their presence at the trial.66 The determination of the temperance committee was equally evident in the type of charges brought against the liquor sellers. Although police magistrate Wortman noted in 1892 that "there is just one line of parties,"67 legal provisions applying to recidivists were rarely used when the town council was involved. Only 6 per cent of indictments involved second or third offences. By contrast, when the temperance committee took charge of enforcement, about one indictment out of ten pertained to a repeat offence. When we exclude the committee's first months of activity in 1886, indictments for second and third offences account for almost 18 per cent. The gap between private and public initiatives is even wider with regard to convictions. About 17.8 per cent of convictions derived from second or third offences between 1886 and 1888; this figure dropped to 6.8 per cent during municipal intervention in the following period. In addition, the citizens' committee showed more firmness in enforcing penalties imposed by the police magistrate. For example, many seizures of property were carried out between 1886 and 1888.68 The committee's methods, however, were controversial, and created tensions within the community. "Such high handed proceedings," wrote a Times reader on the subject of the incarceration of witnesses, "might be tolerated in Turkey, but surely not in Westmorland."69 The use of paid witnesses was also criticized. Acting police magistrate R.B. Smith had little sympathy for the prohibitionists when he discovered that a legal minor was among the paid wit-

159 Prohibition or Regulation? Figure 2 Fines Imposed and Fines Paid for CTA Violations, 1881-06

Source: Times, 1881-95, Transcript, 1896; MMN 6, 4/1-4, 1889-96, PANE.

nesses: "If the C.T. Act can only be enforced through the deliberate making of drunkards, by the Temperance Party, in my judgement at least, a very doubtful mode of doing good has been introduced by its passage."70 Other citizens contested temperance committee strategies on the grounds that they were unfair. The author of a letter to the editor in a local daily maintained that while important retailers were favourably treated, small liquor sellers were judged more harshly: "The poor woman received no sympathy, or consideration, even though it be her first offense, and is allowed to be incarcerated in Dorchester, simply for violating a law that others no better than her are violating in gilded saloons and hotels so-called."71 The temperance committee's approach led to numerous legal confrontations. Suits and countersuits between innkeepers, prohibitionists, and the police were not rare.72 Legal resistance from the liquor community was particularly strong, mainly in the form of appeals to the Supreme Court of New Brunswick. Close to half the convictions issued in Moncton between 1886 and 1888 were brough to the attention of the highest court in the province, which resulted in the overburdening of judicial mechanisms. In June 1888 seven suits in replevin were pending before the county court, while fifteen appeals on certiorari were still to be adjudicated by the Supreme

160 Drink in Canada

Court.73 In the end this judicial resistance, along with the geographical mobility of the liquor community, resulted, if not in complete paralysis, then at least in a notable slowdown of the penal process. Indeed, only a few cases were prosecuted by the temperance committee in the Moncton police court after June 1888. More convictions would only have added to the judicial burden without improving the CTA'S effectiveness, since most fines could not be exacted until the judicial obstacles were overcome. When the temperance committee disbanded, twenty-seven sentences had yet to be enforced and $1,799.50 in fines had yet to be collected.74 The committee's activities provoked not only epistolary and judicial confrontations but also physical ones. One incident before the municipal court in June 1888 is revealing of the prevailing antagonisms between the liquor community and the temperance committee. Having been accused of a breach of the CTA, Mrs Margaret Wallace, described by Le Moniteur acadien as "une femme forte et determinee," did not hesitate to lash out at the temperance committee's prosecutor with a big whalebone whip to express her discontent: Mrs. Wallace here stood up and commenced to apply the horsewhip vigorously to Mr. Grant's head and shoulders. She had given him four or five severe blows when Mr. Grant managed to get hold of the whip. Mrs. Wallace then seized him by the long hair and doubling him up, commenced pounding the table with his head. Sitting Magistrate Smith here called on Marshall Thibideau [sic] to stop the fight and that officer seized Mrs. Wallace, but she refused to relinquish her grip in Grant's hair. The Marshall pulled. Mrs. Wallace pulled. Mr. Grant pulled - in an opposite direction of course. The Marshall finally succeeded in parting them, Mrs. Wallace giving Mr. Grant a parting kick.75

Such a public clash between a liquor retailer and a member of the temperance committee probably led many citizens, and certain prohibitionists, to question the course of the prohibition experiment in Moncton. Public whipping and hair-pulling by a woman was not part of the new society that prohibition reform was supposed to bring about. It was in this charged climate, while community tensions were at their peak and retailers' resistance had partially paralysed the penal process, that the United Temperance Committee decided to disband and to relinquish its responsibility for enforcing the Scott Act. After two years of activity the committee members had succeeded in proving the applicability of the law by convicting dozens of liquor sellers and closing down some outlets. But the pro-

161 Prohibition or Regulation?

hibitionists' greatest victory was probably their success in changing alcohol-selling practices. They imposed a higher standard of discretion on liquor retail operations. As the Reverend W.B. Wiggins, the committee's secretary, explained: "Instead of liquors being publicly exposed for sale, as it was when we began, when we could walk in the street and see bottles in the windows, so soon as we began work, the bottles were taken away from the windows and the blinds were closed, and those who sold liquor were at their wit's ends to know how they might sell. [The committee] closed up the public sale and then stopped."76 Thereafter, the sale of alcoholic beverages was no longer conducted as openly and publicly as in the early i88os. Evidence of this privatization can be found in the spatial organization of hotels and restaurants involved in the liquor trade. For example, customers who wanted a drink might enter the building by a back door instead of through the front entrance, or the sale and consumption of alcohol could take place on the second floor rather than at street level.77 Being less visible in the urban scenery, the sale of alcoholic beer, wine, and liquor became less shocking to the community. The members of the committee had not, however, achieved their ultimate objective of closing down all outlets and eliminating alcohol consumption. The decision to end the committee's activities did not mean that most prohibitionists no longer believed in the usefulness of the CTA; on the contrary, to many it remained the best weapon then available in the fight against intemperance.78 Nor did it necessarily imply a softening of prohibitionist convictions. However, the committee's involvement did end on a note of compromise, with both prohibitionists and liquor sellers settling outstanding cases out of court.79 The decision to end the committee's activities attests instead to the difficulty of having certain members of a community enforce a penal measure of a moral nature on other community members. Admittedly the prohibitionists did succeed in having the law enforced, but at the price of multiple confrontations among the citizenry and an increase in legal disputes. Given this situation, many prohibitionists probably decided that the committee's relative success with regard to the alcohol trade could not compenate for the negative effects of the strong-arm tactics involved in enforcing the measure, or at least that a cooling-off period was called for.80 Institutional paralysis and community tensions also influenced the town council's intervention in December 1888. First, it took charge "without assuming any responsibility or costs in connection with suits now pending and without relieving the bondsmen from

162 Drink in Canada

the Temperance Committee from any liability in connection with these matters."81 Then it adopted what appears to have been a different attitude towards the very enforcement of the law. After the town took over, the Times' editorialist noted that "the Marshall is making little noise in prosecuting the Scott Act offenders, and some people may think that because there is less wrangling among citizens, fewer appeals and less 'law/ nothing is being done ... The present mode of procedure will at least add considerably to the revenues of the town."82 From 1889, the enforcement of the CTA indeed seemed less rigid, and consequently less litigious. A net decrease in the number of legal challenges by the convicted liquor retailers was recorded, with only 5 per cent of all cases appealed between 1889 and 1896. The methods introduced by the town council, however, inspired discontent in certain prohibitionist circles. It was accused of downplaying the importance of the principles of temperance and of emphasizing instead the financial advanages associated with the enforcement of the measure. Some prohibitionists alleged that the town council and the liquor community had agreed to limit the number of indictments and to spread them over a certain period of time in return for regular payment of fines.83 Such accusations were quickly rejected by other contemporaries. Defence attorney G.P. Thomas, for one, told the federal commission of inquiry on alcohol in 1892 that he "[did] not think it would be possible for that state of affairs to exist without [his] knowing of it." However, he did have doubts concerning the probity of some members of the town council, some of them being linked to the liquor trade.84 Financial considerations certainly played a part in the authorities' approach to the enforcement of prohibition. From the outset, financial arguments were used by the town council to justify its lukewarm attitude to the CTA. Such considerations may also explain the authorities' decision to take charge of enforcement and their apparent decision to moderate penalties against the illegal sale of alcohol. Between 1889 and 1896 some $16,000 worth of fines were paid to the city for CTA violations, which, on average, represented over $2,000 annually. Although Scott Act fines made up only a fraction of the town's revenues, they were important enough to have a small impact on the town's budget. Indeed, revenues derived from the Temperance Act represented 2 to 5 per cent of the town's total revenue between 1889 and 1893. The money amply compensated for the loss of revenues from municipal liquor permits.85 The fines that were exacted were not exclusively used for enforcement of the law but were added instead to the town's general fund and could be spent in areas ranging from daily administration to urban improve-

163 Prohibition or Regulation? Figure 3 Annual Amount of Fines Paid for CTA Violations by Three Major Liquor Dealers, 1890-96

Source: MMN 6, 4/1-4, 1890-96, PANE.

ments.86 Some prohibitionists were not in agreement. Wrote one to the Times from neighbouring Dorchester: "While the liquor sellers in Moncton are paving the way to perdition with the traffic your civic authorities are paving [y]our streets with the price of blood. When the Lord makes inquisition for blood will the case of your Mayor and councillors be better than that of your rumsellers?"87 It is impossible to verify whether there indeed existed a tacit agreement between the town council and the liquor merchants. Yet there is a certain regularity and constancy in the amounts of the fines imposed on the town's major alcohol retailers. The annual sum paid in fines by each of them remained relatively stable over time. Notably, this is the case with three major innkeepers from 1889 to 1896 (see Figure 3). Starting in 1890, D. McCleave, for example, made annual payments of $150 for five years and $100 for two years. The annual fine payments made by the innkeeper O.S. Leger were similar. As for D. Hogan, he paid $150 annually for six years and $100 for one year. These three examples suggest that the amount paid annually by major dealers was constant. The liquor retailers and the town authorities seem to have reached a mutually beneficial compromise through this method of enforcement of the CTA. While the fines increased municipal revenues, they were not frequent or

164 Drink in Canada

important enough to stifle the liquor trade. In this context, punishment for breaches of the law was meted out intermittently by police, probably to maintain a certain control over the trade. In return for the softening of the authorities' attitude to enforcement, the liquor sellers seem to have been more willing to pay fines. In a sense the imposing of fines at more or less regular intervals simply replaced the issuing of liquor permits. This fact was duly noted by the provincial government in 1904 to justify its refusal to impose provincial prohibition: "The Canada Temperance Act ... is in many places, particularly in cities and towns openly violated and in some places by the tacit consent of the local authorities - the payment of fines periodically exacted having taken the place of fees under the licence Act."88 From this perspective the primary role of the law was no longer one of prohibition but one of control. Its essential aim was not to prevent the consumption of liquor but to regulate and privatize it.89 Yet such a method of enforcement deviated substantially from the theoretical objectives of the law. It thus seems that the act strayed from its initial path: the prohibition of the liquor trade at the local level. By means of a process spread over a number of years and marked notably by the deterioration of the social climate within the community, the two parties arrived at a modus vivendi. The law then became an instrument of regulation of the liquor trade and, incidentally, a source of municipal revenue. This mutation took place through the interaction of the values and interests of the prohibitionists, the liquor merchants, the municipal authorities, and the community. It sheds light on the relative ideological flexibility of some prohibitionists in light of community pressure and on the efficiency of the liquor community's diverse tactics in modifying the way the prohibition law was enforced. The latter aspect is particularly significant. It seems in this instance that the controlled group had a certain impact on the very method of control imposed on it. The Monctonian prohibitionist experiment probably paralleled that of other Maritime or, more generally, North American towns. One can find in other settings the same fluctuating pattern of enforcement efforts, shaped by the same actors with similar motivations, and yielding the same lukewarm result: the continuance in one form or another of the liquor trade.90 To be sure, compared to other Maritime towns, Moncton had one distinguishing feature that must be taken into account: the ethnic composition of the population. However, if the Acadians seem generally to have been opposed to prohibition, their presence does not appear to have affected the enforcement of the law directly. On the one hand,

165 Prohibition or Regulation?

Acadian influence on the town's administration was minimal, even non-existent. On the other, the prohibitionists do not appear to have focused on ethnic issues in their fight to adopt and enforce prohibition. If such preoccupations did exist, they were not openly expressed. At most we may note a declaration made by the editor of the Transcript on the necessity of awakening the Acadians to the prohibitionist cause during the referendum of 1888.91 In light of these elements, the case of Moncton is probably not that distinctive. The local-option experiment there must not have been that different from that of other Maritime towns.

8 The East-Coast Rum-Running Economy ERNEST R. FORBES

The following is a brief profile of some aspects of the economics of rum-running in Canada's Maritime provinces. For purposes of analysis and organization I have borrowed a concept popularized by the economist Parzival Copes of Simon Fraser University. For several years now Professor Copes has been enlarging on the thesis that in periods of recession and depression the fisheries in Canada have played the role of the "employer of last resort." As jobs disappeared in other industries and small businesses failed, people sought employment in the fisheries, which were open to many different levels of capital and experience. This paper will suggest that in the prohibition era of the 19205, a period of regional depression, it was rum more than the fisheries that became the true "employer of last resort."1 Maritimers were not only drawn to rum-running by the hope of profits; they were pushed in that direction by the economic depression and the failure of traditional industries. At the primary level of distribution rum-running emerged less as a new industry than as a redeployment of the resources of the fisheries. The Volstead Act of 1920 imposing prohibition in the United States was followed by regulations prohibiting Canadian fishermen from landing their catches directly at American ports. To the costs of trans-shipment were later added new duties on fish products by the FordneyMcCumber tariff. Some large Maritimes boats, including most of the eighteen-vessel halibut fleet based in Yarmouth, shifted their

167 The East-Coast Rum-Running Economy

operations to Massachusetts in order to retain their access to the American market.2 Others joined "Rum Row" and the business of helping Americans to circumvent prohibition. A related industry involved the smuggling of booze into the Maritimes. In January 1925 the Maritime Merchant reported that about half the Lunenburg fishing fleet of approximately one hundred vessels was engaged in the rum trade. Many of these were leased to American syndicates at the prevailing rate of $2,500 per month. In the same year, partly as the result of more vigorous American enforcement, monthly rentals on Lunenburg schooners rose to a reported $4,ooo.3 Though Canadians might legally participate, rum-running was not an option available to all. The moral sanction against the rum industry, especially for those of evangelical or social-gospel bent, was a formidable one. Bill Duff, Lunenburg member of Parliament and the owner of several schooners, unexpectedly felt the force of this sanction in the debates over church union. When Rev. Dr John Pringle outlined the United Church "basis for union" to a parliamentary committee, he mentioned the word "sin," only to be heckled by anti-unionist Duff with the inquiry, "Sin, Dr Pringle, what is sin anyway?" "Sin," Pringle replied, "is rum-running!"4 The resistance to rum-running in Baptist and Methodist communities on the south shore was so pronounced as to be noticed by later commentators. Goeff and Dorothy Robinson in their delightful Nellie J. Banks note that "rum-running was not the choice of the Lockeport men."5 Many of these who would not participate in the rum trade sold their vessels, initially at bargain prices, to the rum-runners, whose needs created a growing market for second-hand boats and, eventually, for new vessels from the boatyards of the region.6 If the rum trade provided an alternative to a distressed fishing industry for some vessel owners and markets for the boats of others, its effect on individual Maritime communities was mixed. The Lunenburg Progress-Enterprise in 1924 reported the closure of a fish plant because of the lack of fish, which it attributed to rumrunning.7 The Maritime Merchant lamented the long-term damage to the salt-fish trade, as the absence of the "Lunenburg cure" from the fish markets of the world would mean the loss of its status as a highly respected brand of salt fish. Moreover, as retired captains later reported in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio documentary, the switch to the rum trade created widespread unemployment among the fishermen, as much smaller crews were required in transporting booze.8 But we should not push these arguments too far. The rum trade was not the basic cause of the fishermen's diffi-

i68

Drink in Canada

culties. Indeed, we might speculate that without the rum industry as an alternative, the pressure would have been even greater on depressed fish markets. On shore the wholesale distribution network offered entrepreneurs one of a very few new opportunities to make money in an otherwise bleak Maritime economy. The success of Pictou County's Amy Mason in rum distribution after her return from a brief Hollywood acting career testifies to the opportunities available for those with capital, initiative, and a willingness to brave the moral disapproval of the respectable community.9 The rumours of local businessmen who accumulated capital from the shore-based side of the industry are legion. But their activities were clearly illegal and are usually difficult to verify. The retail trade offered the easiest access for the ordinary person with limited capital. Here the risk was greatest in terms of both police harassment and moral reprobation. In his account of his four years as a temperance inspector, Clifford Rose offers several examples of the retail trade as quite literally the employer of last resort. He tells of Paddy Nolan, the hockey star, who, unable to find a job despite his connections in the ruling provincial Conservative party, opened a rum shop with the approval and protection of prominent party officials.10 If jobs were scarce for men in the Maritimes during the 19205, they were virtually non-existent for women. Females were prominent in the retail rum trade, especially single parents. Barry Grant suggests a welfare role for rum in the case of Mrs Donnie Hart of Saint John, who was arrested for bootlegging at least once a year from 1916 to 1924 and was not imprisoned, apparently because she had three dependent children." Clifford Rose refers several times to a Mrs Delores Nicholson, whose establishment he had repeatedly raided. Rose is usually tolerant in his references to opposite numbers in the rum trade, but he has nothing good to say about that Delores. Perhaps he was prejudiced as a result of being hit over the head with a bottle in a raid on her place. After the publication of Rose's autobiography six years ago, Mrs Bernice Masson of Trenton took out an advertisement in the New Glasgow Evening News to tell the other side of Delores's story. It seems that Delores was the daughter of a Springhill miner, one of nine children. After the death of her husband and hampered by a crippled hand, she became the sole support of two children. In that pre-welfare period, as Mrs Masson put it, Delores had "a job to do and did it the only way she knew how." In the process she "fought rotten government, cops and crooked politicians." Mrs Masson went on to comment on incidents and individuals mentioned in Rose's book but remembered best

169 The East-Coast Rum-Running Economy

Delores's "tears when her children went hungry and the nights when the three, mother and children, cuddled with arms around each other to keep warm." Masson concluded: "By now, you may be wondering how I came to know all this. Well I too lived in that dive beside the railroad tracks and I am the very proud daughter of that savage, cruel, profane tongued woman called Delores described on page 42 of the book."12 The end of prohibition in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia hit women such as Delores particularly hard. Nova Scotia made some provision for them, resurrecting in 1930 a Mother's Allowance Bill similar to that promised a decade before but never implemented. New Brunswick did not. The premier's office papers in Prince Edward Island contain the petition from a young Moncton woman, I— M—, a widow with two children, ill with tuberculosis and seeking release from the Charlottetown jail. An accompanying memorandum from the attorney-general's office enables us to piece the story together. Apparently put out of business by the competition from the new government liquor stores in New Brunswick, Mrs M— transferred her bootlegging operations to Prince Edward Island. Arrested and convicted, she was expelled from the island and warned never to return. Her second arrest in August 1928 resulted in her incarceration in the Charlottetown jail.13 If the weakest members of society became most dependent on the rum industry, so too did the weakest level of government. Municipalities in the Maritimes were often used by the provinces to escape politically damaging financial burdens and responsibilities. In the operations of the Temperance Act of 1878 they received a rare item of largesse as the designated recipients of fines. By the turn of the century hard-pressed municipalities were reported to be milking illegal rum outlets through regular prosecutions and fines. The advent of the more complete prohibition of the 19205 greatly enhanced revenues from this source. As Rose's diary reveals, town fathers maximized revenues by prosecuting "first offenders" only, no matter how often these offenders might be convicted. And the revenues were considerable. Indeed, the referenda on the question of prohibition in 1927 and 1929 in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia respectively can be viewed in part as a clash between the economic interests of two levels of government. The provincial governments expected to gain millions in annual revenues from so-called government control and led the fight to end prohibition. On the other side were those with the most to lose. As Premier E.N. Rhodes later explained, their opponents included the towns, "because of the revenues from fines," and the bootleggers, "who were practically solid

170 Drink in Canada

against us and the rum-runner as well."14 The municipalities lost their revenues from rum at a time when they bore the constitutional responsibility for meeting the needs of the unemployed and destitute. Not only would they fail to meet these needs, but many were effectively bankrupt by the mid-i93os.15 Besides the employment opportunities that the rum industry provided directly, it also led to the creation of several hundred jobs within the civil service at the three levels of government. Prohibition and the rum industry became important agents in the growth of the bureaucratic state. As legislation tightened and offences multiplied, municipalities hired additional police, some with the specific designation of temperance inspectors. Meanwhile, the provinces appointed their own inspectors. Nova Scotia's chief inspector in 1926 reported a provincial staff of nine and estimated the number of municipal inspectors at "about 80. "l6 In the same year the federal government, previously represented in the region by the RCMP and Customs and Revenue officers, created a Preventive Force to focus specifically on the rum trade. The Marine Division operated as a coast guard to prevent smuggling; other officers were exclusively land based. Specific motives for contributing to the growth of the police force varied. For the municipalities, the additional revenues secured by new constables seem to have provided an obvious incentive. For provincial and federal governments, opportunities for patronage and the political rivalry between federal Liberals and provincial Conservatives over control of the rum trade were probably the dominant motives. Additional patronage accrued to the party in power through the dispensation of provincial vendorships. With prohibition, provincial governments gained the exclusive right to dispense franchises for the sale of liquor for medicinal, sacramental, and manufacturing purposes. Their sales in the three provinces approximated more than half a million dollars annually by the mid-i92os.17 Although the vendors were not paid by government, a vendorship enabled a person who had no previous experience or training in dispensing drugs to earn a good living. Art Doyle, formerly of Saint John, told how his family's fortunes took a sharp upturn when his grandfather received a vendorship after the election of the J.B.M. Baxter government in 1925. Grandfather had been a ward chairman, and this was his reward. In his case, however, the award proved a mixed blessing, as he became too much his own best customer. Art's grandmother was less than pleased. She approached Baxter to urge him to cancel the vendorship. Baxter refused, reminding her of the

171 The East-Coast Rum-Running Economy

quickness and severity of her husband's temper and his importance to the Conservative Party organization in Saint John. She had more success with L.P.D. Tilley, the minister responsible, who apparently lacked the political astuteness of his illustrious forefather. Tilley cancelled the vendorship. "And that," Art Doyle concluded with a grin, "is why I am a Liberal today."18 Altogether, the rum industry was responsible for the employment or support within the law of several hundred enforcement officers, vendors, and prosecuting and defence attorneys. This advance in bureaucratization would not be reversed but rather consolidated with the termination of prohibition. At the federal level the preventive force was incorporated into the RCMP. Provincial temperance inspectors were included in provincial police forces, for whom the burgeoning automobile traffic created ample business, and the government take-over of the rum industry was expected to provide the financing.19 But depression disappointed expectations, and in the early 19305 the provinces passed their police forces and enforcement responsibilities over to the federal government and the RCMP. From the provincial government's control of a portion of the rum trade through the vendorship, it was but a short step to more complete control through government liquor stores, in which the patronage was transformed from vendor franchises for the faithful to regular civil-service positions. Once again the expansion of government activity encouraged by prohibition and the rum industry was regularized and consolidated as federal and provincial governments divided the spoils from the rum trade between them. Left out in the cold were the municipalities. The rum trade in the Maritimes was indeed the employer of last resort. At the wholesale level it offered new entrepreneurial opportunities and an alternative to a slumping fishing industry. Ordinary people, including women, found employment in a shrinking economy at a time when jobs were simply not available elsewhere. Many found new opportunities for employment within the law as the rum trade created a new bureaucracy that would endure after rum sales became a government monopoly. But for most the rum trade provided but temporary relief for individual problems. The economic dislocation occasioned by the end of prohibition in Canada would initially be concealed by the brief construction boom in the Maritimes during the last two years of the 19205 - a boom slightly enhanced by the construction of several dozens of government liquor stores. In the depression that followed, this economic dislocation would be submerged and lost sight of in the general economic misery of that decade.

9 "Profit was just a circumstance": The Evolution of Government Liquor Control in British Columbia, 1920-1988 ROBERT A. CAMPBELL I was in the legislature in the formative stages. It was stated then by the responsible minister that control was the main purpose. Profit was just a circumstance - it was too bad. As far as I'm concerned, the act was only for control. Colonel Donald McGugan, Chairman, British Columbia Liquor Control Board, 1951-19691

One popular assumption about government liquor sales in Canada has been that the provinces entered the liquor business and remain in it primarily to make money. In 1921 British Columbia became the first province in English Canada to abandon prohibition for government liquor stores. Although fully aware of liquor's revenue potential, local politicians were just as concerned that government control offer an acceptable compromise between prohibitionists and their opponents, particularly over the sensitive issue of public drinking. Liquor did become financially important to the province. Yet access to alcohol also remained a divisive social and political issue that encouraged successive governments to give a high priority to control, despite the apparent contradiction between revenue and regulation. THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL

Government control of liquor was the outcome of British Columbia's brief experience with prohibition. Prohibition itself was a product of

173 "Profit was just a circumstance"

the reform movement inspired by Canada's transformation towards urban, industrial nationhood in the twentieth century. Prohibitionists, the drys, blamed alcohol for the ills of a nation undergoing rapid change. Even in British Columbia, where reform sentiment was generally weak, the liquor question provoked intense debate that crossed party and class lines and spawned many organizations. The focus of the dispute between prohibitionists and their opponents, the wets, was licensed public drinking, or the evil saloon to the drys, who usually defined their cause in such moral terms. During the First World War prohibitionists successfully linked their fight to the war effort. British Columbia followed the other provinces (except Quebec, which never went completely dry) in outlawing the private sale of liquor in 1917. Still, prohibition ended neither public drinking nor the debate over access to alcohol; if anything, it intensified both.2 Prohibition proved very difficult to enforce. A province could eliminate retail sales, but the federal government had primary responsibility for manufacturing and interprovincial trade. The result was that breweries and distilleries continued to make their products for sale outside the province, and drinking British Columbians could legally purchase liquor from other provinces. They also "obtained questionable prescriptions for medicinal alcohol, or frequented hotel saloons that survived selling non-alcoholic 'near beer' and anything else they could slide by the inspectors." Nearly total federal prohibition went into effect in April 1918, but it expired at the end of 1919. By then many British Columbians were fed up with a dry law that appeared ineffective and unfair. In 1919 a group of business leaders, some of whom had previously supported prohibition, organized the Moderation League, which advocated the sale of liquor in government stores. Actually, some government stores already existed to dispense the popular medicinal liquor.3 By the end of federal prohibition, the British Columbia Liberal government also had grown disenchanted with its emphasis on reform. The party could maintain no consensus on the contentious liquor problem, and the debate in the party mirrored that of the province. Although he personally supported prohibition, Premier John Oliver was pragmatic enough to realize that his government could not maintain it without a renewed show of public support. The federal government had promised to give any prohibition province the power to ban liquor imports from other provinces if the idea were approved by the voters. Instead, the BC attorney general, Joh W. Farris, announced in March 1920 that the voters would choose

174 Drink in Canada

between prohibition and the alternative of public sales. No friend of the drys, Farris maintained that "there is no middle course. You have to embark on a policy of exterminating alcohol ... or [of selecting] the alternative system of sale under strict regulation." In the intense campaign between the moderationists and the prohibitionists the Liberals remained neutral, which meant they had withdrawn their official support for prohibition. On 20 October 1920 the voters, who now included women, chose government control over prohibition, 92,095 to 55,448.4 REVENUE OR CONTROL?

Implicit in the 1921 Government Liquor Act, promoted as the "moderation act," was an obvious dilemma. It gave the government the dual responsibility to sell liquor and to encourage moderation. The Liberals' solution was to confine retail sales to government stores operated by an appointed Liquor Control Board (LCB) that reported to the attorney general. The first stores opened in Vancouver on 15 June 1921, six weeks after the Quebec government began to sell liquor.5 Nothing better represented the compromise of state control than the government liquor store. There the LCB sold the product but did not promote it as a private retailer would have. Only a small sign identified the store's purpose, and dark green windows and curtains hid the interior. The starkness inside discouraged lingering; the atmosphere was reminiscent of a bank, with the assets kept safely behind a formidable counter. In larger stores customers first lined up to have their mandatory liquor permits approved, although the approval was often ignored in practice. With another clerk they placed their written orders and paid for purchases in cash. From a third clerk customers received their goods. All the staff and usually the customers were men; few women and no children entered a liquor store.6 While the board only briefly experimented with formal purchase limits, store vendors had the authority to restrict how much any person could buy. Most people, however, could not afford to buy much expensive liquor at one time. In 1921 an imperial quart of good rye whisky cost at least $5, and beer cost $3.50 for a dozen quarts. Even for the relatively well-paid vendors, a quart of rye and a dozen beer consumed over a day's wages. Did the government set prices to maximize revenue or limit consumption? In reality officials tried to do both, but they learned that these two sides of the liquor coin were difficult to separate.7

175 "Profit was just a circumstance"

In 1922 the House Speaker and MLA for Omineca, Alex Manson, replaced Farris and assumed responsibility for the LCB. To the new attorney general, revenue was secondary to control. In his lively correspondence with the prohibitionists Manson made his views quite clear: "I have no hesitation in publicly and emphatically saying that so long as I am Attorney-General charged with the administration of the Act the moral issue will be the first issue. The revenue will be an incident only." He assured Rev. A.E. Cooke of the prohibition association: "I am doing my utmost through our Vendors to see that the amount of liquor consumed by the individual is curtailed so that the least possible harm can come to the individual drinker and his family from the use of liquor." Yet Manson understood the links between control and revenue. He acknowledged that the government would profit from liquor sales but told the prohibitionists that to sell liquor at cost would be "immoral/' as "the conditions that would ensue would be far from good." Cheap liquor, he believed, would promote excessive consumption.8 Although Manson had once told him, "The Government's need of revenue should [not] be mentioned in the same breath with the Liquor Act," Premier Oliver leaned towards liquor profits. Like Manson, Oliver knew profit and control were difficult to separate: "I am of the opinion that the Government is entitled to take a very substantial profit from this business, not only because they require a revenue, but also because the high price of liquor tends to limit the consumption thereof." Yet in 1922 Oliver expressed more concern that a proposed price cut of 10 per cent would actually reduce profits by 50 per cent. He cautioned the attorney general to "make careful calculations as to the effect which proposed change in prices will have on the Revenue." By 1923 liquor profits accounted for over 15 per cent of the provincial government's income. As Table i shows, the provincial government quickly became reliant on liquor revenue; by 1930 liquor sales provided nearly 23 per cent of the government's income.9 The dilemma of revenue versus control involved more than the search for a mythical "fair price" that would maximize revenue but minimize consumption. If people didn't like the government's prices, they might go elsewhere. And they did. Manson implemented price reductions in an attempt to stamp out bootleggers, who regularly undersold the government. That battle continued for the rest of the decade, in part because, until 1928, British Columbia did not have the authority to regulate all liquor that entered the province. Moreover, bootlegging was closely linked to rum-running to the dry United States, and the fantastic profits created a carnival

176 Drink in Canada

of corruption across both countries. Finally, illegal competition with the government also included public drinking, the issue that refused to go away.10 BEER PARLOURS: PUBLIC DRINKING RETURNS

With public drinking the government had taken a hard line. The new liquor act created the crime of drinking in public; previously only public drunkenness had been illegal. Unless licensed by the LCB, all drinking had to take place in private homes, and even there drunkenness was forbidden. Because the act also specifically outlawed the private sale of near beer, government control rather than prohibition actually closed the hotel saloons, at least temporarily. Even the words "bar" and "saloon" were banned from public display.11 While prohibitionists were pleased with the government's position, their opponents wanted the return of beer sold by the glass in hotels and private clubs, especially veterans' clubs. From the beginning, veterans' representatives said their clubs would continue to "distribute" (for a fee) beer to bona fide members. They were soon joined by hotel owners, who created private clubs in former saloons, with membership "dues" as low as ten cents. Naturally the breweries supported these efforts, and early court decisions favoured the clubs. The Moderation League and the British Columbia Hotels Association (BCHA) continued to besiege the government for the legal sale of beer by the glass in licensed facilities. Hotel owners claimed licensed drinking would curtail bootlegging, increase respect for the law, and reduce the costs of enforcement.12 Inside the legislature beer dominated debate and continued to jeopardize Liberal unity, as the party contained both anti- and pro-beer zealots. As a compromise, in 1923 the attorney general announced that the LCB would license private clubs to hold and dispense their members' liquor, and the clubs could charge a fee for the service. On the specific issue of the sale of beer by the glass, Manson said the voters would decide. The plebiscite bill asked the people if they approved of "the sale of beer by the glass in licensed premises without a bar under Government control and regulation."13 One again wets and drys fought a spirited campaign, but the result of 20 June 1924 was against beer, 73,853 to 72,214. Even in the cities beer had problems. Victoria, the capital, defeated it, and

177 "Profit was just a circumstance" Table 1 British Columbia Liquor Revenue as a Percentage of Provincial Revenue

Year 1922

1923 1926 1930 1933 1938 1943 1947 1952 1957 1962 1967 1970

1975 1980 1984 1985

Net General Revenue ($ million)

15.2 17.0 18.8 21.1 25.7 31.6 39.1 57.8 157.1 273.1 346.4 630.6 1269.8 2930.3 6232.4 8523.3 9487.0

Liquor Revenue ' ($ million)

2.1 2.6 3.5 4.8 2.3 4.1 8.2 14.8 20.2 25.3 29.4 45.0 61.7 120.6 233.6 364.6 369.2

Liquor Revenue as a % of Net General Revenue

13.8 15.3 18.6 22.7

8.9 13.0 21.0 25.6 12.9

9.3 8.5 7.1 4.6 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.1

Sources: Provincial revenue: figures supplied by Statistics Canada. Liquor revenue: Statistics Canada, Control and Sale of Liquor in Canada, various years. * Nine and one-half months. ** From 1970 on, calculated from Gross General Revenue.

Vancouver approved it by only seventy-eight votes. The fear of the return of the saloon had been the deciding factor. Yet twenty-three of forty electoral districts supported beer by the glass, and according to legislation passed the previous December, those ridings that had approved beer could apply for licences.14 The first parlours, which opened in 1925, were a strange solution to an odd problem. The government had the mandate to reinstate public drinking but not to permit the return of the saloon. Nothing in the act or regulations confined licences to hotels, but the hotels had the facilities. Before prohibition the government had restricted saloons to hotels, and the BCHA lobbied the government to confine parlours to hotels. The government's main concern was to minimize debate, so what soon evolved was an alliance between the BCHA and government through the LCB. In return for beer licences, the hotel industry agreed to follow strict regulations that banned all the amenities of the old saloons. No bar was permitted; patrons had to sit at tables where waiters served them draft or bottled beer. For

178 Drink in Canada

nearly thirty years parlour operators sold only beer; they could not stock soft drinks, food, or cigarettes. The LCB permitted no entertainment of any kind and banned all games, even checkers. Ostensibly to reduce prostitution, the parlours tried also to ban women, but in the end settled for separate areas for the sexes. In short, in a beer parlour there was little to do but drink, and waiters emptied barrels of beer into bored customers.15 While beer parlours gave the government additional licence revenue, their greater significance was that they turned the LCB into a licensing agency and thus expanded the government's liquor patronage opportunities. From the beginning the Liberals administered government control with traditional patronage considerations a priority. Yet liquor control differed in one crucial way from other government activities. Alcohol remained a serious moral and political issue that crossed party lines and diminished the normally unifying effect of patronage. The public exposure of prominent Liberals engaged in bootlegging and rum-running contributed to the Liberals' defeat in 1928. Despite these initial problems, however, "as the first province in English Canada to choose government control, British Columbia stood out as a North American experiment in the post-prohibition world of alcohol regulation. By the end of the decade all provinces but Prince Edward Island had adopted monopoly sales; by 1936 so had 15 American states."16 DEPRESSION AND WAR

The Great Depression of the 19305 had two significant influences on the evolution of government control. First, the financial crisis forced the government to place additional emphasis on liquor revenue. More important, the Depression contributed to the repeal rather than the modification of prohibition in the United States in 1933. Repeal had a profoundly negative effect on the dry forces in both countries. Prohibition became "temperance" again, and from then on the drys were always on the defensive. Their diminished influence was readily apparent in the Second World War, a decidedly "wet" war. By its end the majority of British Columbians clearly favoured looser liquor laws. The Depression severely hurt liquor sales. Already saddled with falling provincial revenue, the provincial government had to face a drastic decline in liquor profits. As Table i reveals, in 1930 the LCB generated $4.8 million (22.7 per cent of provincial revenue) for the public purse. By 1933, however, liquor profits had fallen to $2.3 mil-

179 "Profit was just a circumstance"

lion (8.9 per cent of provincial revenue), the lowest figure since the first year of government control. In part declining liquor sales were likely a result of declining consumption. Yet official consumption figures were computed from store sales, and sales were also affected by a dramatic increase in home production and petty bootlegging. Those who made liquor often sold it.17 In December 1930 the provincial Cabinet announced a general liquor price reduction. Since control rather than profit was the ostensible goal of public sales, the government would only tell the press that the price reductions had been made on the advice of the LCB. The unstated assumption was that lower prices would increase legal liquor sales. That assumption was reinforced by a commission appointed by Conservative Premier Simon Fraser Tolmie to improve government efficiency. Its controversial 1932 report was candid about what LCB priorities should be: "We think the board might well be advised to experiment as any merchant would do with a reduction in prices to ascertain whether an increase in sales justifies the reduction in prices from a profit point of view."18 The government's concern over liquor revenue became more acute with the repeal of American prohibition. Repeal meant that Americans no longer had to come to British Columbia to buy their liquor. Moreover, LCB officials feared that neighbouring Washington State liquor would compete, legally or illegally, with LCB products. The government took some additional action, such as lowering the price of a liquor permit from two dollars to twenty-five cents. Fortunately for the government, however, the minimal start of an economic recovery began to restore liquor revenue. Still, profits did not return to their pre-Depression levels until the Second World War, and the province continued to endure much competition from bootleggers.19 American repeal had a more pronounced effect on the prohibition movement. Prohibition became a scapegoat for the economic collapse, and Americans abandoned it with a vengeance. Its defeat left wets firmly in control of public opinion, which to this day continues to regard prohibition as a disastrous experiment rather than a modestly successful reform. The impact in Canada was less intense because, by the Depression, government control was already the norm. But repeal made it unlikely that prohibition would reappear in Canada in the near future. Soon after America went wet, the British Columbia Prohibition Association changed its name to the British Columbia Temperance League (BCTL). Although the most devoted kept their faith, the majority shifted their emphasis from alcohol elimination to restriction. Ironically, in practice that now

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meant defending government control against those who wanted liquor restored to the jurisdiction of private enterprise.20 The Second World War showed how much had changed since the end of federal prohibition in 1919. With renewed prosperity liquor consumption increased, and liquor sales provided needed revenue for both levels of government. The Dominion's enthusiasm to raise liquor taxes at first alarmed provincial leaders, since liquor was one of the few independent sources of revenue left to them during the war. Under the Wartime Tax Agreements negotiated with the provinces in 1941, Ottawa "rented" some shared areas of taxation, such as personal and corporate income tax. But the provinces refused to abandon jurisdiction over lucrative liquor sales. To placate the premiers, the federal government exempted liquor boards from price controls, and federal tax increases were passed on to consumers. In addition, Ottawa guaranteed minimum liquor profit levels for the provinces. Those guarantees were never needed because, in the words of a fiscal historian, "all the provinces had underestimated the alcoholic capacity of their citizens under the stress of war." By 1943 liquor earned the British Columbia government over $8 million per year, nearly double the pre-Depression high.21 Both levels of government appear to have had an insatiable thirst for liquor revenue during the war, but they could not ignore the efforts of temperance groups to restrict access to alcohol. Although the influence of the drys had waned, they still represented a significant force. Soon afater the war started, the BC Temperance Leagu asked Ottawa to ban liquor manufacturing and close the beer parlours for the duration. At first the pleas fell on deaf ears. As the war intensified, howeve, liquor again became a political problem. Canadians still shunned prohibition, but by 1942 they appeared more willing to sacrifice for the cause. The war was in its third year; Canada was now fighting Japan as well Germany, and victory seemed further away than ever. The Americans had banned spirits production soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Canadians kept on drinking. Between 1939 and 1942 sales of spirits increased nearly 40 per cent and beer 60 per cent. Temperance leaders argued that liquor thwarted the war effort and Canadian savings should buy bonds, not booze.22 Ever sensitive to the prevailing political winds, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King announced a wartime temperance plan in a 16 December 1942 radio address. King said the government needed a total war effort, and in part that meant reducing consumption to promote efficiency and improve morale. The government had recently banned spirits production, and King said that existing

181 "Profit was just a circumstance"

supplies would be reduced in strength. Moreover, each province would have to reduce hard liquor sales by 30 per cent and beer and wine sales by 10 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. The prime minister also announced a ban on all liquor advertising, and he requested that liquor outlets, including beer parlours, be open for no more than eight hours per day.23 The hotel owners were increasingly concerned about the continued temperance attacks on beer parlours. By the time the prime minister made his announcement, both the BCHA and the Hotels Association of Canada had already prepared elaborate briefs stressing that parlours served as "workman's clubs." By providing a relaxing atmosphere and a "drink of moderation," parlours improved the efficiency and morale of war workers, or so the two associations argued.24 The British Columbia government never moved to close the parlours, but the LCD reduced their supplies and cut back their hours. The restrictions included a mandatory "supper hour" closing to encourage patrons to go home and not come back. More important, the LCB and the BCHA joined with provincial health authorities in an expanded anti-prostitution campaign to prevent venereal disease. One health official had described beer parlours "frequented by diseased women" as "an alien fifth column which is insidiously undermining the health of His Majesty's Forces." The campaign included a renewed effort to segregate single men from single women by instituting completely separate sections or rooms in beer parlours, one for men only and one for "ladies and escorts." Sexual segregation had little effect on disease rates, but it helped the hotels to defuse the efforts of temperance groups to close the parlours. In 1944 the LCB chairman told the attorney general of Ontario that the parlour owners undertook the expense and bother of stricter separation because they realized "if their business is to continue they must be extremely careful in protecting their interest by keeping public confidence."25 Despite some temperance success, the Second World War was a wet war overall. The First World War had acted as a catalyst for a popular movement, but by the 19405 most people had lost their enthusiasm for prohibition. For the majority, government control had proved to be an acceptable compromise. Opinion polls showed that Quebec and British Columbia, which had the longest experience with public sales, were the most opposed to the return of prohibition. British Columbians paid patriotic lip service to wartime rationing, but they treated liquor as any rationed commodity; they wanted their full allotment. In 1941 the LCB issued about 230,000

182 Drink in Canada

individual liquor permits; by 1944 that figure had leapt to 976,000, approximately one permit for every person in the province. In a typical British Columbia household every adult acquired a permit and bought liquor. Non-drinkers either gave away or sold their meagre allotment. Reminiscent of prohibition, the abuse of medical prescriptions for liquor again became a problem. In 1941 BC doctor issued 578 liquor prescriptions; in 1944 that figure jumped to 41,730, approximately a 7,000 per cent increase. One doctor even wrote a forty-ounce prescription for an allegedly ill cow.26 Unlike their counterparts in the First World War, the drys in the Second faced a determined and sophisticated opposition that helped to mold popular attitudes. British Columbia beer parlours curried favourable opinion with their participation in the anti-prostitution drive. In both Canada and the United States liquor producers raised the spectre of prohibition and emphasized their contributions to morale and the war effort. Some claimed the drys hurt the cause because they promoted dangerous disunity. At the height of the shortage one American liquor company ran an ad that urged: "Don't Buy Liquor, Buy United States Defense Bonds." In Canada E.P. Taylor, president of Canadian Breweries, became a highly publicized "dollar-a-year" government adviser. Three members of the Molson family left the nation's oldest brewery and served prominently in the armed forces.27 For many Canadians in the military the war years were their introduction to liquor. Even before they went overseas, thousands of men and women learned to drink in military canteens and beer parlours. Waiters rarely asked those in uniform for age identification. With their return at the end of the war, continued prosperity, and the end of liquor rationing, liquor consumption leapt. Nationally it surged 35 per cent between 1945 and 1950. Even Prince Edward Island, dry since the turn of the century, abandoned prohibition for government control in 1948. By the 19505 over 70 per cent of Canadians considered themselves drinkers.28 In British Columbia the most pressing liquor issue after the end of rationing was the expansion of licensed public drinking. No beer parlours had been licensed since the beginning of the war, and Vancouver had the same number as it had in 1930. In greatest demand were licensed restaurants and cocktail lounges, where patrons could buy spirits by the glass. Ontario allowed both in 1947, and Washington State approved the sale of spirits in licensed premises the next year. Vancouverites in particular also expressed interest in licensed cabarets or nightclubs. Illegal bottle clubs (where patrons took their own liquor) thrived in Vancouver, but they existed under the threat

183 "Profit was just a circumstance"

of police raids. In 1949 sixteen thousand people signed a petition in support of licensed cabarets, and a Gallup poll claimed that over two-thirds of BC adults approved of cocktail lounges.29 As for the government, a Liberal-Conservative coalition since the indecisive 1941 election, it was wracked by internal dissent on the liquor issue. Attorney General Gordon Wismer, who had close links to the clubs and hotels, favoured the status quo. His fellow Vancouver members, however, said their constituents demanded looser laws. For years the government stalled, but in 1951 the Cabinet decided on an unimaginative compromise. At the next provincial election the voters would again express their views on liquor. On 12 June 1952 the voters elected a new government and gave overwhelming support to a vaguely worded plebiscite: "Are you in favour of the sale of spirituous liquor and wine by the glass in establishments licensed for such purposes?" Yet the politician who formed the next government in August 1952 was Social Credit leader W.A.C. (Wacky) Bennett. His South Okanagan constituency had voted against the plebiscite. More important, Bennett did not drink, and he opposed more licensed premises.30 WACKY LIQUOR LAWS

Not only was Bennett an abstainer; many of his Cabinet ministers also opposed liquor. Moreover, the party had a core of supporters who actively promoted Christian virtues and a temperate life. Like other temperance advocates, Bennett had favoured a royal commission on liquor, which he hoped would validate the dry cause. His new minority government also received a surplus of conflicting liquor advice from opposing interest groups. Consequently, a liquor study seemed safer than any immediate change. In September 1952 the government appointed a three-member commission to inquire into all aspects of liquor distribution and sale. The chairman, former Tory member of Parliament Harry Stevens, was known for his temperance leanings. Yet a tally of the briefs shows that those who favoured more liberal liquor laws easily outnumbered those who did not. For every brief that opposed cocktail lounges, eight approved them. The main disagreement was over who should receive more liquor privileges.31 The Stevens Commission recommended a complete overhaul of the Government Liquor Act. Even the chairman supported more liberal laws and an end to hotel domination of public drinking. Yet the commissioners also expressed great concern about the problems of alcoholism. They called for research and rehabilitation programs

184 Drink in Canada

financed from liquor revenue. In response to the Stevens Report, which received widespread praise, the government introduced a completely new liquor act in 1953. The new legislation allowed licensed restaurants, cabarets, cocktail lounges, and "public houses," not necessarily attached to hotels.32 When the new act went into effect, however, very little changed. For example, in 1955 almost 80 per cent of the public house (beer parlour) licenses went to hotels; the rest went to clubs and military canteens. Hotels also received the majority of the special restaurant licences that allowed the sale of spirits with meals. In the 19505 British Columbians preferred hard liquor, rather than wine, with their meals. Restaurants outside of hotels had to be content with what they called the "beer and wine brush-off." Only two nightclubs outside of hotels were licensed in 1955; the rest remained illegal bottle-clubs. True, the hotels received less than 15 per cent of the cocktail lounge licences, but the majority (73 per cent) went to military canteens and private clubs, which, in theory, were not accessible to the general public.33 Directly related to the continued hotel domination of public drinking was the retention of a one-member Liquor Control Board. Colonel Donald McGugan had been with the board since 1923, and in 1951 Bennett's predecessor appointed him LCB chairman. Colonel McGugan emphasized the "control" in government control, and he fully supported the compromise with the hotels on public drinking. Indirectly the liquor inquiry had severely criticized the colonel, but under W.A.C. Bennett he developed a reputation as stern, aloof, and uncorruptible. The press often referred to him as the "liquor czar," and he carefully cultivated his public crotchetiness. Thus, McGugan had the proper image to satisfy a temperance-leaning government, which ignored his fondness for multi-martini lunches. To a surprising extent critics of the government's liquor policies directed their wrath at the colonel, although ultimately he only enforced government policy.34 On one issue the premier did attract much personal criticism. Bennett's opponents charged that the teetotal premier had no hesitation in making as much money as possible from government liquor stores. In 1952 the government earned about $20 million from liquor; by 1970 that figure had more than tripled to over $61 million. Some of this money helped to finance what another generation would call Socred megaprojects: highways, dams, and bridges. Yet Bennett countered that his was not a liquor government because liquor profits never came close to the social costs of alcohol abuse funded from the public purse. Moreover, Table i shows that as a

185 "Profit was just a circumstance"

percentage of provincial revenue, liquor profits declined throughout his tenure. Actually they had peaked in 1947 at 25.6 per cent. In 1952 liquor sales contributed nearly 13 per cent of government revenue; that figure fell to less than 5 per cent in 1970, where it has remained. Rather than reflecting the premier's distaste for liquor, however, this continuing decline was more likely the result of increased resource revenue and beneficial financial arrangements with the federal government.35 Even in 1952 Bennett's views seemed out of step with those of the majority of British Columbians. They had given solid approval for expanded licensed public drinking, which he opposed. On the liquor issue the distance between the voters and the premier grew over the years. In the 19505 the province, and in particular Vancouver, experienced a large influx of Italian, German, and other European migrants, who traditionally had more liberal views on liquor. Although urban influences had long been influential in the province, greater Vancouver increased its dominance in the postwar years. By 1961, 48 per cent of the population lived in the Vancouver area. Yet probably more significant than the sheer numbers of allegedly "wet" urban dwellers was their location to the American border. In British Columbia electronic advertising of liquor was illegal, but most people received American stations that allowed beer and wine advertising. Implicit in the ads was the link between alcohol consumption and the "good life."36 Finally, liquor simply became more available, in part because of more outlets but also because its real price continued to drop. Tables 2 and 3 reveal how dramatic were those decreases. As late as 1979 overall liquor prices across the country were three-quarters of their 1950 levels. In British Columbia the real price of beer in 1976 was a third lower than it had been in 1950. Real liquor prices only began to rise in the 19805, but by 1988 they had still not reached their 1950 levels. By the late 19605 British Columbians in general regarded liquor, if consumed in moderation, as something that enhanced life rather than impaired it. Alcohol abuse certainly had not disappeared, but in the public mind concern about more exotic drugs such as marijuana and LSD had replaced worries about liquor. Temperance seemed moribund, and its message largely fell on deaf ears. In response to a tremendous amount of public pressure, including some within his own party, Bennett acted in 1969. Although many of the Stevens Commission's recommendations still gathered dust, Bennett appointed another commission on liquor, chaired by Judge William Morrow. The commission met for a year, heard 153 wit-

i86 Drink in Canada Table 2 Alcohol Real Price Index, Canada (1949 = 100)

1950 1955 1965 1970 1975 1979 1982 1984 1986 1988

100 95.5 92.9 89.4 80.2 75.3 79.3 84.9 89.8 93.3

Sources: Calculated from Statistics Canada, Consumer Price and Price Index, cat. 62-010, various issues.

Table 3 Beer Real Price Index, British Columbia* (1949 = 100)

1950 1954 1967 1971 1976 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988

101.9 94.2 79.2 74.4 66.6 72.5 73.9 79.7 93.2 95.7

Sources: Calculated from Statistics Canada, Consumer Price and Price Index, cat. 62-010, various issues; and 1950-80: Michael A. Goldberg with Catherine Eckel, Price Competition in the British Columbia Breiving Industry (Vancouver: UB Faculty of Commerce 1982), 78-80; and 1982-1988: British Columbia Liquor Distribution Branch, Annual Report, various years. * Includes sales tax; does not include bottle deposit.

nesses, and accumulated fifty-one volumes of evidence. Once again the majority of presentations called for liberalization, including more licensed public drinking, easier access to alcohol, and less regulation of the liquor industry.37 In March 1970 the Morrow Commission released its report. It acknowledged that liquor laws no longer meshed with public attitudes about liquor, especially public drinking. According to the commissioners, even the 1953 liquor act was "based on the unhappy days of prohibition; it is archaic and cruel in many respects." The

187 "Profit was just a circumstance"

LCB needed to shift its emphasis from "control and regulation" to "public service." The commission recommended a number of new licences, including alternatives to the cavernous beer parlours.38 Although the government accepted a few of the commission's recommendations, such as lowering the drinking age to nineteen, for the most part they were ignored or rejected. In 1971 Bennett announced a ban on all alcohol and tobacco advertising in the province, which then seemed a regressive move. In 1972 the premier admitted that the ban had failed and rescinded it. Yet the contrite premier was no longer Bennett but Dave Barrett, leader of the nominally socialist New Democrats, who had defeated Social Credit in August 1972. Liquor was not a major campaign issue, but the NDP had pledged to implement the Morrow Commission's recommendations.39 LIBERALIZATION VERSUS MODERATION

Although the party held power for just over three years, the New Democrats initiated the most significant liquor policy changes in the fifty years of government control. Unlike Social Credit, which had close links to the hotels, the NDP was not beholden to any of the vested liquor interests, and the party could more easily respond to demands for change. In 1974 the government began to license real neighbourhood pubs that were not confined to hotels. A variety of other facilities also received liquor licences, including cruise ships and outdoor cafes. As well, the NDP loosened many of the constraints on beer parlours, such as the restrictions on entertainment, wine sales, and standing while drinking. Sexual segregation had formally been eliminated in the 19605, but many parlours still practiced it. The attorney general said he hoped wine sales would now encourage more women in beer parlours because he considered them a moderating influence.40 In May 1975 the government introduced two new liquor acts. Each bill created a separate liquor branch, one for control and licensing and another for the distribution of liquor, primarily through government liquor stores. The separation did not resolve the dilemma of revenue versus control, but at least it allowed each branch to focus on its specific task and not operate at potentially cross purposes. In addition, Barrett's government also initiated some privatization of liquor distribution by licensing the first private "agency" stores in remote areas where population did not warrant government stores. The changes started by the NDP were actually completed by a revitalized Social Credit Party led by Bill Bennett,

i88 Drink in Canada

Wacky's son. The Socreds defeated the New Democrats in a December 1975 election, before the liquor acts were proclaimed.41 The new Bennett government, however, entered a political world where the problems of alcohol abuse had regained some public notice. The media no longer paid much attention to traditional temperance groups, but they did not ignore the findings of the Le Dain Commission. The federal Commission into the Non-medical Use of Drugs interpreted its 1969 mandate to include alcohol and tobacco, although Ottawa was more interested in hallucinogens and narcotics. Its 1973 final report concluded: "From almost any point of view the effects of the excessive use of alcohol are more harmful than those of any other form of non-medical drug use."42 During the 1974 debate on liberalization in the British Columbia legislature, Liberal leader David Anderson admitted that the Le Dain Report had influenced his views on liquor. In the 1972 election campaign Anderson had favoured beer and wine in grocery stores. He even referred to the Liberals as the "drinking man's party." Two years later, however, he said liberalization would mean that "you are going inevitably to increase the number of deaths on the highways, you are going to increase your hospital problems, your problems of death by liver complaints, cancer, homicide, suicide."43 Yet the liquor issues that really attracted renewed public attention were the related ones of abuse among young people and drinking and driving. Throughout North America drinking and driving became a well-publicized social problem in the 19705 because of the number of accidents in which alcohol was a factor and because of the number of young people, especially young males, involved in such accidents. Just as important, the drinking driver became an easy target for the press, government, and community activists. According to sociologist Joseph Gusfield, the drinking driver represented "the leading protagonist in the moral drama of automobile accidents. He supplies a major explanation for a source of death and destruction." Public pronouncements de-emphasized road hazards and poorly made cars as causes of accidents. Instead they focused on the "drunken driver." Drinking drivers had sinned against the social order, which helped to explain the emphasis on severe punishment.44 When the Social Credit government revealed its liquor policy in 1977, "moderation" dominated the press release. At about the same time the government announced its "CounterAttack" campaign, "an all-out war against drinking drivers." Officials fought the war with education programs, advertising, and, most important, police roadblocks. In 1969 Parliament had amended the Criminal Code to pro-

189 "Profit was just a circumstance"

hibit driving when one's blood-alcohol content exceeded 0.8 per cent. In 1977 British Columbia adopted the use of Breath-Alcohol Testing Mobile Units (BATmobiles) to catch drinking drivers at roadblocks. The province also enhanced the federal legislation with additional penalties for drinking and driving. Increased penalties pleased citizen-activist groups such as Mothers Against Drunk [now Drinking] Drivers (MADD). Founded in California in 1980, the first chapter of MADD in Canada was established in British Columbia the next year. More than any other group, MADD portrayed the drinking driver as evil and a literal threat to the family.45 The campaign against drinking and driving acted as catalyst for what might be called a new temperance movement. In general, new temperance was a response to high levels of consumption and the concomitant problems of alcohol abuse. Rather than a single movement, new temperance assumed a variety of forms across the continent, but in British Columbia it was secular and political. Reducing alcohol consumption and abuse were its goals. A commitment to "moderation" as opposed to liberalization, and the preservation of government control of liquor distribution were its unifying themes. Community groups, health organizations, and many local governments argued that private-enterprise, profit-oriented liquor distribution would encourage more consumption and ultimately more abuse.46 At the same time, for a variety of reasons, liquor liberalization remained a priority with the British Columbia government. First, it was still the demand of many consumers and the liquor industry. In addition, so-called "civilized" drinking laws continued to be actively promoted by the same press that campaigned against drunk drivers. Moreover, from 1979 on, the Bennett government was politically committed to deregulation of private enterprise and privatization of public services. By these standards, government liquor stores and tight restrictions on the liquor industry were an anomaly, if not anathema. Finally, the Bennett government bet its reputation on Expo '86, and some argued that the liquor laws were not liberal enough for the world's fair. For example, the president of the Restaurant and Food Services Association maintained that the province needed liquor laws that met "international standards so that we won't be a laughing stock when Expo '86 comes around."47 By the mid-1980s the government had removed beer price controls from the breweries and pubs, permitted radio and television advertising of beer and wine, and increased Sunday openings. In preparation for Expo '86 the government also considered the possibility of beer and wine sales in grocery stores. Opponents reacted

190 Drink in Canada

immediately. The Vancouver city council voted nine to one against further privatization of distribution. Alderman Bruce Eriksen had no patience with grocery sales: "What's happening here is there are a bunch of free enterprisers up there who don't care about the social cost and there's a great big liquor lobby all across Canada." Less ideological but equally negative opinions were expressed by the police, MADD, and various alcohol-rehabilitation organizations. In 1985 the government announced that beer and wine would not be sold in grocery stores. Instead the government licensed hotel and neighbourhood pub stores to sell British Columbia products only.48 The tension between moderation and liberalization was also readily apparent in the 1987 Liquor Policy Review. In 1986 Bill Bennett had retired, and his successor, William Vander Zalm, was even more committed to privatization and deregulation. In November 1986 he directed his ministers to develop an "action plan" to withdraw the government from liquor retailing. As part of that process, early in 1987 the government announced another general study of liquor, but with privatization possibilities its main emphasis.49 Liquor policies had been under almost continual examination for a decade, but the Liquor Policy Review (LPR) was the first full-scale public inquiry since 1969. The three-member committee (all Social Credit legislators) toured sixteen communities throughout the province. At the hearings over four hundred briefs and submissions were presented. In addition the committee received over twelve hundred written submissions and letters. The moderation, antiprivatization groups overwhelmed the committee with their views. An alphabet-soup list of organizations, from MADD to the BCMA (British Columbia Medical Association), opposed further privatization. Most urged stricter control, and all argued that more privatization would increase alcohol abuse. A number of groups raised an old and "often repeated message" at the hearings: the cost of alcohol abuse in British Columbia was about $2 billion annually, or about five times what the government received in liquor revenue. Even the Vancouver press had become more circumspect about privatization. The Province cautioned: "B.C. has the worst drinking problem in the country and that fact has to be weighed against any moves to liberalize the liquor laws."50 In general the commission's report advocated stricter control and greater enforcement. While the members accepted the idea of limited privatization, they concluded that "beverage alcohol should not be retailed in food, drug, department or general merchandise stores beyond the existing rural agency store program." They added, "We do not believe that privatization is strongly supported

191 "Profit was just a circumstance"

by the majority of British Columbians and we are concerned that such a move would lead to increased consumption and abuse." They also advocated more restrictions on licensed public drinking, which the government almost completely accepted.51 In response to the Liquor Policy Review, the government also tempered its commitment to liquor privatization. The plan to sell 140 of the province's 217 stores was shelved. Instead the minister responsible for liquor announced that "a mix of existing liquor stores and a gradually expanding role for private sector liquor retailers is the way to serve the consumers of British Columbia." He further claimed that liquor "is a controlled substance. It is a substance we have responsibility for. The public expects the government to exercise some discretion in the controlled use of that substance." The new Vander Zalm government had quickly learned that liquor remained a complex political and social issue in British Columbia nearly seventy years after the institution of government control.52 By the 19805 the influence of prohibition sentiment had long since disappeared, yet the basic issue of access to alcohol still provoked much debate. The compromise of government control had originally been instituted to end that debate, but it had been only partly successful. The 1921 ban on public drinking simply did not work. Its replacement, licensed public drinking in the strictly regulated private sector, also presented problems. Licence holders and those who wanted licences battled each other almost as soon as the beer parlour doors opened. Thus, little evidence exists of a united "liquor interest" in British Columbia. While the granting of licences became increasingly bureaucratic and less partisan, favouritism, even corruption, never disappeared. In 1988, for example, the provincial ombudsman released a damning report on the licensing of a neighbourhood pub. The report resulted in the resignation of the general manager of the licensing branch and the eventual conviction of others on forgery charges. Finally, and most important, although the trend has been towards more public drinking, its opponents have never ceased to pressure the government, sometimes with considerable success.53 Because of the dilemma of revenue versus control, in some ways liquor stores have proved to be an even thornier problem for officials. From the beginning of control the government has been in a awkward position and open to much criticism because it both sells liquor and promotes moderation. In the 19205, at least, the Liquor Control Board made liquor-buying a difficult and vaguely guiltinducing activity. Now the Liquor Distribution Branch uses the

192 Drink in Canada

latest marketing techniques, such as free samples and impulse bins by the cash registers, to promote store sales. If profit were the only consideration, the government would long ago have restored distribution to the private sector and secured revenue with high levels of taxation. Privatization would seem to eliminate an apparent contradiction and a colossal political headache. Yet implicit in government control from the start was the assumption that liquor was potentially too dangerous to be considered just another product whose consumption could be determined by market forces. Support for that assumption has varied among different groups, and the consumerism of the post-war decades nearly obliterated it. In reaction to high levels of consumption and abuse, however, the new temperance movement of the 19705 displayed a renewed commitment to the original assumption. Moreover, it was able to wield political clout. The government was forced to admit, perhaps somewhat begrudgingly, that in liquor matters, control was still as important as profit.

Notes

JOHN BARLEYCORN

MUST DIE

1 For information on the liquor trade with Canada's native peoples, see Dwight B. Heath, "Alcohol Use among North Americans," Research Advances in Alcohol and Drug Problems 7 (1983): 343-96, and other sources listed in the bibliography. 2 The rum trade in the Maritimes has been analysed in James Morrison and James Moreira, eds., Tempered by Rum: Rum in the History of the Maritime Provinces (Porters Lake, NS, 1988), a volume of uneven quality. See in particular the contributions of C. Mark Davis, Judith Fingard, D.A. Sutherland, and Julian Gwyn. Drinking habits in Upper Canada were discussed in an early, entertaining article by M.A. Garland and J.J. Talman, "Pioneer Drinking Habits and the Rise of the Temperance Agitation in Upper Canada prior to 1840," in Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Ontario: Essays Presented to James J. Talman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974), 171-93. 3 See Joseph R. Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981). 4 Studies of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union are listed in the bibliography. They include Carol L. Bacchi, Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983); Wendy Mitchinson, "The WCTU: A Study in Organization," International Journal of Women's Studies 4, no. 2 (1981): 143-56; Sharon Anne Cook, "'Continued and Persevering Combat': The Ontario Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evan-

194 Notes to page 5 gelicalism and Social Reform, 1874-1916," PhD, Carleton University 1990; Marcia A. McGovern, "The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Saskatchewan, 1886-1930: A Regional Perspective of the International White Ribbon Movement," MA, University of Regina 1979; and Nancy M. Sheehan, "The WCTU on the Prairies, 1886-1930: An Alberta-Saskatchewan Comparison," Prairie Forum 6, no. i (1981): 17-33. Important American studies include Jack S. Blocker, Jr, 'Give to the Wind Thy Fears': The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873-1874 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1985), and American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston: Twayne 1989); Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1981); Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the tvcrt;(Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1984); Barbara L. Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism and Temperance in Nineteenth-century America (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press 1981). For the British context, see Lilian Lewis Shiman, Crusade against Drink in Victorian England (London: Macmillan 1986). The international structure of the organization is discussed in Ian Tyrrell, "Women and Temperance in International Perspective: The World's WCTU, 18803-1920," in Drinking: Behavior and Belief, ed. Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley: University of California Press 1991), 217-40. 5 John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1973), 114. 6 See the works cited above, as well as T.W. Acheson, Saint John: The Making of a Colonial Urban Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1985); F. Laurie Barren, "The Genesis of Temperance in Ontario, 1828-1850," PhD, University of Guelph 1976; Sandra Barry, "Shades of Vice ... and Moral Glory: The Temperance Movement in Nova Scotia, 1828-1848, MA, University of New Brunswick 1986; J.K. Chapman, "The Mid-Nineteenth-Century Temperance Movements in New Brunswick and Maine," in Canadian History before Confederation: Essays and Interpretations, ed. J.M. Bumsted (Georgetown, Ont.: Irwin-Dorsey 1972), 444-61; James M. Clemens, "Taste Not, Touch Not, Handle Not: A Study of the Social Assumptions of the Temperance Literature and Temperance Supporters in Canada West between 1839 and 1859," Ontario History 64, no. 3 (1972): 142-60; C. Mark Davis, "Prohibition in New Brunswick, 1917-27," MA, University of New Brunswick 1978; M. Graeme Decarie, "Something Old, Something New ... Aspects of Prohibitionism in Ontario in the 18905," in Oliver Mowat's Ontario, ed. Donald Swainson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972), 154-71; Ernest J. Dick, "From

195 Notes to pages 5-6

7

8

9

10

11 12

Temperance to Prohibition in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia," Dalhousie Review 61, no. 3 (1981): 530-52; Ernest R. Forbes, "Prohibition and the Social Gospel in Nova Scotia," Acadiensis (1971); Gerald A. Hallowell, Prohibition in Ontario, 1919-1923 (Ottawa: Ontario Historical Society 1972); Albert J. Hiebert, "Prohibition in British Columbia," MA, Simon Fraser University 1969; Richard N. Kottman, "Volstead Violated: Prohibition as a Factor in Canadian-American Relations," Canadian Historical Review 43, no. 2 (1962): 106-26; R. McLean, "'A Most Effectual Remedy': Temperance and Prohibition in Alberta, 1875-1915," MA, University of Calgary 1969; Janet Noel, "Temperance Evangelism, Drink, Religion and Reform in the Province of Canada, 1840-54," MA, University of Ottawa 1978; Erhard Pinno, "Temperance and Prohibition in Saskatchewan," MA, University of Saskatchewan 1971; Margaret J. Strople, "Prohibition and Movements of Social Reform in Nova Scotia, 1894-1920," MA, Dalhousie University 1974; James L. Sturgis, "Beer under Pressure: The Origins of Prohibition in Canada," Bulletin of Canadian Studies 8, no. i (1984): 83-100; John H. Thompson, "The Voice of Moderation: The Defeat of Prohibition in Manitoba," in The Twenties in Western Canada, ed. Susan Mann Trofimenkoff (Ottawa: National Museum of Man 1972). Dwight B. Heath, "A Decade of Development in the Anthropological Study of Alcohol Use: 1970-1980," in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, ed. Mary Douglas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 17. See also Marianna Adler, "From Symbolic Exchange to Commodity Consumption: Anthropological Notes on Drinking as a Symbolic Practice," in Drinking: Behavior and Belief, ed. Barrows and Room, 376-98. Klaus Makela, in Alcohol Control Policies in Public Health Perspectives, ed. Kettil Bruun et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies 1975), 345, as cited in Heath, "Decade of Development," 43-4. Paul Verden, "The Concept of Ambivalence with Reference to Alcohol Use and Misuse in American Culture," International Journal of Social Psychiatry 14 (1968): 252-9. Harry G. Levine, "Demon of the Middle Class: Self-Control, Liquor and the Ideology of Temperance in igth-Century America," PhD, University of California at Berkeley 1978, 2. A fine survey of American drinking habits is Mark E. Lender and James K. Martin, Drinking in America: A History (New York: Free Press 1982). Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton, Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation (Chicago: Aldine 1969). Joseph R. Gusfield, "Passage to Play: Rituals of Drinking Time in American Society," in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink

196 Notes to pages 6-9 from Anthropology, ed. Mary Douglas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 73-4. 13 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon 1980, 1992), 49-69. 14 Levine, "Demon of the Middle Class," 198, 80. 15 Alan J. Epstein, "The Social Function of the Alehouse in Early Modern London/' PhD, New York University 1976, ii-iv. 16 Ronald M. Benson, "American Workers and Temperance Reform, 1866-1933," PhD, University of Notre Dame 1974, 95-100. 17 James H. Gray, Booze: The Impact of Whisky on the Prairie West (Toronto: Macmillan 1972), 21. 18 Keith C. Powell, Drinking and Alcohol in Colonial Australia 1788-1901 (Canberra: National Campaign against Alcohol Abuse 1988), 2. 19 David W. Conroy, "The Culture and Politics of Drink in Colonial and Revolutionary Massachussetts, 1681-1870," PhD, University of Connecticut 1987, abstract. 20 Barry, "Shades of Vice," 15, 17, 18-19. 21 Thomas Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in i8th-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988), 14-15. 22 Gusfield, "Passage to Play," 81. See also Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press 1983). 23 David W. Gutzke, Protecting the Pub: Brewers and Publicans against Temperance (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Royal Historical Society 1989), 53. For more on the Canadian saloon, see Howard Christie, "The Functions of the Tavern in Toronto, 1834 to 1875, with special reference to Sport," MPE, University of Windsor 1973. 24 Thomas J. Noel, The City and the Saloon: Denver, 1858-1916 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1982), 91. 25 John C. Burnham, "New Perspectives on the Prohibition 'Experiment' of the 19203," Journal of Social History 2 (1968): 53. 26 Peter Clark, The English Ale-House: A Social History, 1200-1830 (London: Longman 1983), 21-2, 32, 81. See also Judith M. Bennett, "The Village Ale-Wife: Women and Brewing in 14th Century England," in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. B. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1986), 20-36. 27 Noel, City and Saloon, 3. 28 Peter McGahan, Crime and Policing in Maritime Canada (Fredericton: University of New Brunswick 1988), 15-16. 29 Clark, English Ale-House, 131-2. 30 Gutzke, Protecting the Pub, 32-3.

197 Notes to pages 9-11 31 Roy M. MacLeod, "The Edge of Hope: Social Policy and Chronic Alcoholism, 1870-1900," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 22, no. 3 (1967): 216. 32 Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815-1872 (London: Faber & Faber 1971), 47. 33 Ibid., 47. 34 Heath, "Decade of Development," 17. 35 See Donald Horton, "Alcohol Use in Primitive Societies," in Society, Culture and Drinking Patterns Re-examined, ed. David J. Pittman and Helene R. White (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies 1991), 7-31. 36 WJ. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press 1979), chap. 5. 37 Ibid., 246. 38 For an overview of Canada's boom-bust cycles of the nineteenth century, see Michael Bliss, Northern Enterprise: Five Centuries of Canadian Business (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1987), espec. chaps. 7, 8, 10. 39 Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, chap. 5. 40 For more on nineteenth-century mobility, see Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-iyth Century City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1975). 41 Patricia E. Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform: Antialcoholism in France since 1870 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship 1988), 19 42 For more on the power of the alcohol industry in the contemporary context, see John Cavanaugh and Frederick Clairmonte, Alcoholic Beverages: Dimensions of Corporate Power (New York: St Martin's Press 1985). 43 The debate over the use of alcohol in therapeutics is discussed in Cheryl L. Krasnick, ',Because There Is Pain: Alcohol, Temperance and the Victorian Physician," Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 3 (1983): 1-22; Bartlett C. Jones, "A Prohibition Problem: Liquor as Medicine, 1920-1933," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 18 (1963): 353-69; John H. Warner, "Physiological Theory and Therapeutic Explanation in the i86os: The British Debate on the Medical Use of Alcohol," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 54, no. 2 (1980): 235-57; James H. Cassedy, "An Early American Hangover: The Medical Profession and Intemperance, 1800-1860," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50, no. 3 (1976): 405-13; and Sarah E. Williams, "The Use of Beverage Alcohol as Medicine, 1790-1860," Journal of Studies on Alcohol 41, no. 5 (1980): 543-65.

198 Notes to pages 11-13 44 French cafe culture is examined in Michael R. Marrus, "Social Drinking in the Belle Epoque," Journal of Social History 7, no. 2 (1974): 120-8; Susanna Barrows, "'Parliaments of the People': The Political Culture of Cafes in the Early Third Republic," in Drinking: Behaviour and Belief in Modern History, ed. Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley: University of California Press 1991), 87-97; Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture. 45 Roland Sadoun, Giorgio Lolli, and Milton Silverman, Drinking in French Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies 1965), 49. 46 Powell, Colonial Australia, 3. 47 Acheson, Saint John, 139-40. 48 Dick, "i9th Century Nova Scotia," 532-3; C. Mark Davis, "Rum and the Law: The Maritime Experience," in Tempered by Rum, 43-5; Barry, "Shades of Vice," 9-11. 49 Reginald Smart and Alan C. Ogborne, Northern Spirits: Drinking in Canada Then and Now (Toronto: Addiction Research Foundation 1986), 13-17. Another useful ARF publication is Eric Single and Thomas Storm, Public Drinking and Public Policy (Toronto: Addiction Research Foundation 1985). 50 Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, 56, 84-91. 51 There are no national figures on alcohol consumption in Canada prior to 1871. For subsequent rates, see Robert E. Popham and Wolfgang Schmidt, comps., Statistics of Alcohol Use and Alcoholism in Canada, 1871-1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1958). 52 Clemens, "Taste Not, Touch Not," 142-3; Smart and Ogborne, Northern Spirits, 9. 53 Hiebert, "Prohibition in B.C.," 10. 54 Prestwich, Antialcoholism in France, 204. 55 Gutzke, Protecting the Pub, i. 56 Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 29; Gutzke, Protecting the Pub, 45-51. 57 MacLeod, "Edge of Hope," 222. 58 Elizabeth Malcolm, 'Ireland Sober, Ireland Free': Drink and Temperance in lyth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1986), 24; George Bretherton, "Against the Flowing Tide: Whiskey and Temperance in the Making of Modern Ireland," in Drinking: Behavior and Belief, ed. Barrows and Room, 147-64. 59 Conroy, "Revolutionary Massachusetts," 90. 60 Benson, "American Workers," 40-2. 61 Burnham, "New Perspectives," 55-6. For more on the working class and drink, see Jill Siegel Dodd, "The Working Classes and the

199 Notes to pages 13-16

62 63

64 65 66 67

68 69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Temperance Movement in Ante-Bellum Boston," Labor History 19 (1978): 510-31; Nuala McGann Drescher, "Organized Labour and the Eighteenth Amendment," Labor History 8 (1967): 280-99; J°n M. Kingdale, "The 'Poor Man's Club': Social Functions of the Urban Working Class Saloon," American Quarterly 25 (1973): 472-89; James S. Roberts, Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in igth-century Germany (Boston: Allen & Unwin 1983); W.J. Rorabaugh, "Rising Democratic Spirits: Immigrants, Temperance and Tammany Hall, 1854-1860," Civil War History 22 (1976): 138-57; Samuel Walker, "Terence V. Powderly, the Knights of Labor and the Temperance Issue," Societas: A Review of Social History 5 (1975): 279-93; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will. Acheson, Saint John, 144 and 257, table 8. Robert A. Campbell, Demon Rum or Easy Money: Government Control of Liquor in British Columbia from Prohibition to Privatization (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1991), 30. Decarie, "Something Old, Something New," 158. Dick, "igth Century Nova Scotia," 533-4. See also Acheson, Saint John, 146. A.M. Winkler, "Lyman Beecher and the Temperance Crusade," Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 33 (1972): 939. Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press 1963). Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder, 10-11 and 66, n. 45. Barry, "Shades of Vice," 42. Canada, Commission To Enquire into the Working of the Prohibitory Liquor Law in the United States, Report (Ottawa 1874); Canada, Royal Commission on the Effects of the Liquor Traffic, Minutes of Evidence (Ottawa 1893); Report (Ottawa 1895). Norman H. Clark, The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1965), viii, 67, 69. Hallowell, "Prohibition in Ontario," 15. Decarie, "Something Old, Something New," 167. Hallowell, "Prohibition in Ontario," 5. J.A. Stevenson, Before the Bar: Prohibition Pro and Con (Toronto 1919), 259, as quoted in ibid., 18. Smart and Ogborne, Northern Spirits, 35. Gutzke, Protecting the Pub, 164. N. Clark, The Dry Years, 29. Smart and Ogborne, Northern Spirits, 24.

2Oo

Notes to pages 16-19

80 T. Noel, City and Saloon, 113. 81 Burnham, "New Perspectives," 53. The cinema particularly was significant in ending the reign of the saloon: Husbands and wives attended the cinema regularly together, breaking through the strict separation of the sexes that the predominance of the pub seems to have entailed. In the view of many authoritative commentators, the cinema as the chief in a whole range of alternative leisure pursuits to the pub had played its part in the diminuition of drunkenness. Many chief constables, testifying to the [British] National Council of Public Morals' enquiry in 1917, said so ... [as did] the Earl of Dudley, when opening the new Warley Cinema in 1934: 'Those who are old enough to remember the days before the war can recollect the appalling amount of drunkenness we used to see every day. The fact that in these days drunkenness has practically entirely disappeared I put down very largely to the good effect of the cinema industry,'

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

John K. Walton and James Wolvin, eds., Leisure in Britain, 1780-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1983), 33, quoting Dudley in Birmingham Mail, 24 Dec. 1934. Frederick B. Glaser, director of the University of Michigan Substance Abuse Center and formerly of the Addiction Research Foundation of Toronto, recounted to me the disturbing incidence of gasoline sniffing a colleague noted on a trip to Canada's Arctic region. The following year, armed with therapeutic measures to combat the problem, the colleague returned to the north, only to find that the abuse had virtually disappeared. The reason was that the television cable had reached the community. Sheehan, "WCTU on the Prairies," 19. Thompson, "Voice of Moderation," 182. Pinno, "Temperance in Saskatchewan," 307. N. Clark, The Dry Years, viii. Barry, "Shades of Vice," 65. F. Laurie Barren, "The American Origins of the Temperance Movement in Ontario, 1828-1850," Canadian Review of American Studies 11 (1980): 131-50. Sheehan, "WCTU on the Prairies," 18. Gutzke, Protecting the Pub, 84. Decarie, "Something Old, Something New," 156. Reginald Hose, Prohibition or Control: Canada's Experience with the Liquor Problem, 1921-2927 (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1928), 15. Hose, Prohibition or Control, 20. See Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1985), passim. Gutzke, Protecting the Pub, chap, i; Shiman, "Crusade against Drink," 3-4-

2oi 95 96 97 98

Notes to pages 19-23

Shiman, "Crusade against Drink," 3-4. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 31. Shiman, "Crusade against Drink," 38. Robert L. Hampel, Temperance and Prohibition in Massachusetts, 1813-1852 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press 1982), 29. 99 Norman Longmate, The Waterdrinkers: A History of Temperance (London: Hamish Hamilton 1968), 184. 100 Robert L. Hampel, "Diversity in Early Temperance Reform: Massachussetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, 1813-25," Journal of Studies on Alcohol 43, no. 5 (1982): 453. 101 Hampel, "Diversity in Early Temperance," 453. 102 A.J. Birrell, "D.I.K. Rine and the Gospel Temperance Movement in Canada," Canadian Historical Review 58, no. i (1977): 42. 103 Clemens, "Taste Not, Touch Not," 147-8. 104 Hallo well, "Prohibition in Ontario," 78. The Spence family's histories of Canadian temperance do not mention the self-help groups or reformed drunkards, nor do the histories of their American counterpart. See Ben H. Spence, Liquor Control in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Prohibition Bureau 1928); Ruth E. Spence, Prohibition in Canada (Toronto: Ontario Branch of the Dominion Alliance 1919); Ernest H. Cherrington, The Evolution of Prohibition in the United States (Westerville, Ohio: American Issue Publishers 1920). 105 See Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Education Services 1979), for an interesting analysis of AA. 106 Acheson, Saint John, 149-52. See also Donald W. Beattie, "Sons of Temperance: Pioneers in Total Abstinence and 'Constitutional' Prohibition," PhD, Boston University 1966. 107 James Brown to James Brown Jr, Fredericton, 31 Oct. 1858, Maxwell Collection, James Brown Correspondence, 1841-69, box 4, #11, University Archives, University of New Brunswick. 108 Malcolm, Ireland Sober, Ireland Free, 57. 109 Pinno, "Temperance in Saskatchewan," 20-1. For an Ontario perspective, see also M. Graeme Decarie, "Paved with Good Intentions: The Prohibitionists' Road to Racism in Ontario," Ontario History 66, no. i (1974): 15-22. no Louis A. Vyhnanek, "The Seamier Side of Life: Criminal Activity in New Orleans during the 19205," PhD, Louisiana State University 1979, chap. 3. 111 Davis, "Prohibition in NB," 63. 112 Hiebert, "Prohibition in BC," 5, 23. 113 See Charles R. Snyder, Alcohol and the Jews: A Cultural Study of Drinking and Sobriety (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center of Alcohol Studies

202 Notes to pages 23-4 1958), and Robert F. Bales, "Cultural Differences in the Rate of Alcoholism," Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 6 (1946): 482-98, for a cross-cultural comparison. 114 Michael R. Marrus, Samuel Bronfman: The Life and Times of Seagram's Mr. Sam (Hanover: Brandeis University Press 1991), 13. AntiSemitism among prohibitionists is also apparent in Ernest Gordon, The Wrecking of the Eighteenth Amendment (Francestown, NH, 1943), 157-8. All the same, the National Council of Jewish Women was a member organization of the Dominion WCTU. 115 Ottawa Journal, 8, 11 Oct. 1919, as cited in Hallowell, "Prohibition in Ontario," 48. 116 MacLeod, "The Edge of Hope," 235. 117 David Smith, "Drinking and Imprisonment in Late Victorian and Edwardian Scotland," Histoire Sociale I Social History 19, no. 37 (1986): 171-2; MacLeod, "The Edge of Hope," 239. On the alcoholic poor in Canada, see Judith Fingard, The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax (Halifax: Pottersfield Press 1989). 118 For more on the asylum movement, see Gerald N. Grob, Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (New York: Free Press 1973); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown 1971); S.E.D. Shortt, Victorian Lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the Practice of Late i$thcentury Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986); Harvey Simmons, From Asylum to Welfare (Downsview, Ont.: Ontario Mental Health Association 1982); Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, Moments of Unreason: The Practice of Canadian Psychiatry and the Homewood Retreat, 1883-1923 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1989). 119 Smith, "Drinking and Imprisonment," 163-4. 120 Jones, "Liquor as Medicine," 109. 121 Pinno, "Temperance in Saskatchewan," 188-9. 122 See, for instance, Herbert Asbury, The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1950); Gray, Booze, and Bacchanalia Revisited: Western Canada's Boozy Skid to Social Disaster (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books 1982); Kobler, Ardent Spirits, and Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1971); John H. Lyle, The Dry and Lawless Years (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1960); Kottman, "Volstead Violated"; Clifford Rose, Four Years with the Demon Rum, 1925-1929: The Autobiography and Diary of Temperance Inspector Clifford Rose, ed. E.R. Forbes and A. A. MacKenzie (Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis Press 1980). 123 Campbell, Demon Rum or Easy Money, 23. 124 Marrus, Samuel Bronfman, 12.

203

Notes to pages 24-8

125 In the Canadian context, I refer to the various periods when prohibitory legislation was in force, including the Scott Act period after 1878, the implementation of federal prohibition as a war measure in 1916, and the various provincial measures. 126 Charlottetown Daily Examiner, 2 Sept. 1881, as cited in McGahan, Crime and Policing, 43. 127 Charlottetown Daily Examiner, 4 Jan. 1882, as cited in McGahan, Crime and Policing, 44. 128 Davis, "Rum and the Law," 47. 129 Davis, "Prohibition in NB," i. 130 See Thompson, "Voices of Moderation," 175-9; Pinno, "Temperance in Sask.," 187-9, 208-9. 131 David E. Kyvig, "In Revolt against Prohibition: The Association against the Prohibition Amendment and the Movement for Repeal, 1919-1933," PhD, Northwestern University 1971, 60. See also Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1979). Kyvig has written on the Association against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), an American lobby group of affluent citizens who disliked a centralized, activist government. The AAPA was interested in Canadian solutions to liquor management, publishing the pamphlets The Quebec System and Government Liquor Control in Canada. See also Crystal Fulton, "The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, 1929-1933." MA, University of Western Ontario 1990. 132 Campbell, Demon Rum or Easy Money, i; See also Hose, "Prohibition or Control," 14. DRY PATRIOTISM

I would like to express appreciation to Susan Trofimenkoff, J.M.S. Careless, Douglas McCalla, Wynton Semple, Sylvia Van Kirk, and Roberto Perin for their helpful comments on various drafts of this paper. 1 M. Trudel, Chiniquy (Trois-Rivieres: Editions du Bien Public 1955), 47. 2 On this subject see the discussion by Charle Taylor in T. Hockin, ed., Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall 1977), 112. 3 Jacques Monet observed that French Canadian nationalism "became ultramontane" in the 18405, in "French Canadian Nationalism and the Challenge of Ultramontanism," CHA Historical Papers (1966): 41. Fernand Ouellet remarks upon a "revolution psychologique" among the bourgeoisie in the same period, in Histoire economique et sociale du Quebec 1760-1850 (Montreal: Fides 1971), 591. On the growing influence of the church during this period, see also Michel

204 Notes to pages 28-9 Brunet, "L'Eglise catholique de Bas-Canada et le partage du pouvoir a 1'heure d'une nouvelle donnee (1937-1854)," CHA Annual Papers (1969): 37-51; and P. Hurtubise, ed., Le Laic dans I'Eglise canadienne frangaise de 1830 a nos jours (Montreal: Fides 1972), 4. 4 F. Ouellet, "Nationalisme canadien-francais et lai'cisme au xix e siecle," in J.P. Bernard, ed., Les Ideologies quebecoises du i^e siecle (Montreal: Boreal Express 1973), 55. On the changing position of F.-X. Garneau, see Dictionary of Canadian Biography (hereafter DCS), vol. 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), "Garneau, Franc,ois-Xavier." 5 For a cogent analysis of up-and-coming commercial centres as seats of temperance sentiment, see Ian Tyrell, Sobering Up (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood 1979), esp. 5-7. Brian Harrison's Drink and the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber 1971) acknowledges the complexity of the question but finds "in some areas ... signs of a link between textile manufacturing and the emergence of the anti-spirits movement" (95). In Canada West the movement enjoyed greater longevity in rural districts than in urban areas, just as occurred in Canada East, but Toronto remained a temperance stronghold during the second half of the nineteenth century in a way that Montreal did not; see J. Noel, "Dry Millennium: Temperance and a New Social Order in Mid-igth Century Canada and Red River," PhD, University of Toronto 1987, chap. 6. Useful commentary on the relatively great strength of the French Canadian clergy vis-a-vis the bourgeoisie is found in Brian Young and John Dickinson, A Short History of Quebec (Toronto: Copp Clark 1988), 141-2, 155-9; anc^ m Nadia F. Bid, Le Clerge et le pouvoir politique au Quebec (Montreal: Hurtubise 1978), 26-7, 278-9. 6 Although women joined French Canadian temperance societies, the president of each local society was almost always the cure, and temperance orators were drawn almost exclusively from the male clergy. This stood in contrast to English-speaking communities in the Canadas, where in the 18405 women were active in fund-raising, preparing temperance ceremonies, and selling the Canadian Temperance Advocate door to door. Like American women, English Canadians began founding separate female temperance societies in the 18405 and appearing as platform speakers in the following decade. See Noel, "Dry Millennium," chap. 4. The subordinate role of women in French Canadian temperance is seen in the Societe de la Croix, which became the leading temperance organization in the 18505 after Chiniquy's departure. Women and children were not permitted to join this society as individuals: if the paterfamilias joined, the whole family was automatically enrolled. See Alexis Mailloux, La Societe de Temperance dite Societe de la croix (Quebec 1848), 5.

205 Notes to pages 29-31 7 G. Malchelosse, "Ah! mon grand-per', comme il buvait!" Cahiers des Dix 8 (1943): 142. 8 See, for example, ibid.; Gerald Craig, ed., Early Travellers in the Canadas (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood 1955), 8. On the expanding trade in rum with the inhabitants, see Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1985), 157~9/ 284-5, 47Greer writes that rum, imported at low prices from New England and the British West Indies, "appears to have been the most important vehicle of growth" in the trade of Anglo-American merchants in Quebec. "It quickly became the liquor of mass consumption in the Canadian countryside after the Conquest ... (and) the inhabitants ... soon gained a reputation as drinkers." Greer explains that peasants, like native peoples, had "a limited capacity to absorb imported commodities. Hence the recourse to liquor with its ... property of creating an escalating demand." 9 Le Canadien, 15 Aug. 1807. On the growing domestic production, see H.A. Innis and A.R.M. Lower, eds., Select Documents in Canadian Economic History 1783-1885 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1933), 2:65; F. Ouellet, Elements d'histoire sociale du Bus-Canada (Montreal: Hubertise 1971), 85; G. Hildebrand, "Les Debuts du mouvement de temperance dans le Bas-Canada 1828-1840," MA, McGill University 1975, 16. 10 On seigneurial and upper-class drinking, see Canada Temperance Advocate (hereafter cited as CTA, Sept. 1836. See also Malchelosse, "Ah! mon grand-per'," 146-7; and Jane Brierly, ed., A Man of Sentiment: The Memoirs of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspe (Montreal: Vehicule 1988). De Gaspe also discusses popular drinking customs (69, 120, 211, 250, 263, 380). Urban drinking practices are noted in W.H. Parker, "The Towns of Lower Canada in the 18305," in R.P. Beckinsale, ed., Urbanization and Its Problems (New York: Barnes and Noble 1968), 400, 416. 11 Camille Roy, "Panegyrique de Messire Edouard Quertier," Les Lemons de noire histoire (Quebec 1929), 272. On drink as a protection against the elements, see Hildebrand, "Les Debuts du mouvement," 20; Les Melanges religieux (hereafter cited as MR), 6 July 1849 and 8 Jan. 1850; Journal of the Legislative Assembly of (the Province of) Canada (hereafter cited as /LAC) 1849. app. zzz. On the excesses of the 18305 see Hugolin Lemay, Bibliographic de la temperance (Quebec 1910), 25; Innis and Lower, Select Documents, 2:256; and D. Levack, Un pionnier de I'abstinence totale: Mgr. Ignace Bourget, 1799-1885 (Montreal 1945), 10. 12 On Bishop Bourget's reforms, see J. Grise, Les Conciles provinciaux de Quebec et I'Eglise canadienne (1951-1886) (Montreal: ? 1979), 52; Leon

206 Notes to pages 31-2 Pouliot, Monseigneur Bourget et son temps, vol. 3 (Montreal: Bellarmin 1972), 144-6; Mandements, lettres pastorales, circulaires et autres documents publics dans le diocese de Montreal depuis son erection jusqu'a I'annee 1869 (Montreal 1887), 2: 194; DCS, vol. 9, "Bourget, Ignace," and vol. 10 (1972), "Berthelet, Antoine-Olivier." 13 Hurtubise, Le Laic, 33-4; Mandements, lettres (Jan. 1849), 2:188. 14 For the Bishop of Montreal's endorsement of total abstinence, see Mandements, lettres, Jan. 1842, 1:197. 15 N.-E. Dionne, Monseigneur deForbin-Janson: Sa Vie, Son CEuvreau Canada (Quebec 1895), discusses this episode, as does Louis Rousseau, "Les Missions populaires de 1840-42: acteurs principaux et consequences," Societe Canadienne de 1'Eglise Catholique, Sessions d'etude 53 (1986): 7-21. For reports of the rapid growth of temperance societies in Quebec after the Bishop's visit, see Le Canadien, 20 Dec. 1840 and 15 Jan. 1841; J.S. Buckingham, Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick and the Other British Provinces in North America, with a Plan of National Colonization (London 1843), 2 ^i- The support in the TroisRivieres district, which grew to 10,000 temperance society members by April 1841, is reported in MR, 30 Mar. 1841, and Le Canadien, 9 Apr. 1841. 16 Although the stories in Chiniquy's manuals suggest that ordinary farm wives (and not just disreputable women in the towns) drank, the hierarchy identified intemperance as a male vice. MR, 12 Mar. 1844. 17 L'Aurore, 8 Jan. 1841); MR, 18 July 1843. On the preference for moderation over total abstinence, see MR, 19 and 22 Jan. 1841. 18 C. Chiniquy, Manuel ou reglement de la Societe de Temperance (Quebec 1844), 125. 19 Lemay, Bibliographic, 22, reports Archbishop Signay's remarks. Further evidence of the decline in consumption of hard liquor is found in Ouellet, Histoire economique et sociale, 617; and Robin, Jones and Whitman Company Correspondence, 1841-43, NA MG28, in, 18 vol. 239, letter of clerk Elias de la Parelle from Caraquet, 24 Aug. 1841: "A number of the folks here have joined the Temperance Society and the remainder will do so very shortly; so that we will not require Rum next season." 20 James Douglas (1800-86), who established a medical practice in Quebec City in 1826, subsequently directed the Marine and Emigrant Hospital and co-founded the city's first mental asylum at Beauport. Physicians played a considerable role in temperance reform. The nineteenth-century movement traced its intellectual origins to the Philadelphia surgeon Dr Benjamin Rush, who demonstrated that many mental and physical illnesses could be traced to the heavy drinking of the day. Though doctors frequently prescribed alcohol, a

207 Notes to pages 32-4

21

22

23 24

25 26

number of them endorsed the teetotal movement. This was much more true in the United States than in Britain, where the temperance movement was often perceived as an attack on the medical establishment. A number of leading Lower Canadian physicians endorsed Chiniquy's temperance manual and the then-controversial notion that teetotalism would not be injurious to one's health. Early workers in the field included Father Pierre Beaumont of St Jean Chrysostome parish and Father B. Durocher of Chateau Richer, as well as Father Dufrene of St-Gervais. Bulletin des recherches historiques 3 (1897): 12, 44-5, G. Lemoine, L'Association catholique de temperance de la paroisse de Beauport (Quebec 1843), 7. Le Canadien's description of the event is reprinted in Victor LevyBeaulieu, Manuel de la petite litterature du Quebec (Montreal: ?i974), 103. Marcel Trudel, UInfluence de Voltaire au Canada (Montreal: Fides 1945), 159. The strong correlation between drinking and crime was pointed out by a number of judges, grand juries, and prison officials, as well as by the parliamentary inquiry into intemperance in 1849. See J. Noel, "Temperance Evangelism: Drink, Religion and Reform in the Province of Canada," MA, University of Ottawa 1978, chap. 4. The midnineteenth-century prohibition drive in the United States has been characterized as a response to the spectre of pauperism and urban crime; see Tyrell, Sobering Up, 216. Canada's Maritime regions have been particularly well served with illuminating discussions of the interrelation between criminality and alcohol abuse; see Judith Fingard, The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax (Halifax: Pottersfield 1989), and Peter McGahan, Crime and Policing in Maritime Canada (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane 1988). L'Avenir, 31 Dec. 1847; 12 Feb. 1848. CTA, i Feb. 1845; MR, 22 Oct. 1847; JLAC 1849, app. zzz.

27 MR,24Oct.1848.

28 Parent's comments are to be found in J. Huston, comp., Le Repertoire national (Montreal 1893), 4:81. L'Avenir's call for self-improvement is found in the 16 Oct. 1847 issue. 29 Lower Canada Agricultural Journal (Sept. 1848). 30 MR, 3 May 1849; Chiniquy, Manuel de la Societe de Temperance Dedie a la Jeunesse Canadienne (Montreal 1847), pref.; DCB, vol 10, "Meilleur, Jean Baptiste." 31 Speech of T.S. Brown, Esquire, at the Union Trent, I[Independent] O[rder] of R[achabites] Soiree, March 23, 1848 (Montreal 1848), 3-5; Chiniquy, Manuel des Societes de Temperance Dedie a la Jeunesse du Canada (Montreal 1849), 85.

208

Notes to pages 35-42

32 Cited in MR, 2 Nov. 1847. 33 MR, 4 Dec. 1849. 34 Chiniquy, Manuel (1849), 8. On the Quebec Committee on Reform and Progress, see Trudel, Chiniquy, 100. 35 P. Sylvain, "Quelques aspects de 1'antagonisme liberal-ultramontain," in J.P. Bernard, Les Ideologies, 135; Trudel, Chiniquy, 301. 36 La Minerve, 21 June 1849. 37 Ibid., 7 May 1849. 38 There are accounts of the Chiniquy crusade in Trudel, Chiniquy, 87-130; and in P. Berton, My Country (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1977), chap. 8. 39 MR, 6 Sept. 1850; G. Carriere, "L'Eglise canadienne vers 1841," Revue de I'Universite d'Ottawa 24 (1954): 72. 40 MR, 10 Oct. 1848. 41 This description is drawn from MR, 30 Mar. 1849; CTA, i May 1849; Trudel, Chiniquy, 94. 42 Chiniquy, Manuel (1849), 143-4. 43 Ibid. 44 CTA, i May 1849. 45 Brunei, "L'Eglise catholique de Bas-Canada," 46. 46 MR, 2 June 1848. L'Avenir, 6 Sept. 1848, applauded Chiniquy's patriotism. 47 MR, 30 Mar. 1849. 48 L'Avenir, 6 Sept. 1848; MR, 8 Sept. 1848. 49 MR, 19 Sept. 1848; 26 Sept. 1848; i June 1849. See also JLAC 1849, aPPzzz; CTA, i Jan. 1849. 50 M. Denison, The Barley and the Stream: The Molson Story (Toronto: Me Clelland and Stewart 1955), 119, 195, 207. 51 Chiniquy's amorous adventures are traced in Trudel, Chiniquy, 66ff, 126-35. 52 Mandements, lettres, 19 Mar. 1852, 2:293. 53 Denison, The Barley and the Stream, 234. 54 JLAC 1859, v°l- 17' no-5' aPP-43' JLAC 1856, vol. 14, no. 6, app. 62; J. Douglas, Journals and Reminiscences of James Douglas M.D., edited by his son (New York 1910), 211; A. Mailloux, Essai sur le luxe et la vanite des parures (Ste Anne de la Pocatiere 1867), 129. Post-Confederation temperance drives seemed to reinforce this early pattern; in 1917 it was reported that "rural Quebec was and is, aridly dry, the City of Montreal was and is soaking, sopping wet." Ben Spence, Quebec and the Liquor Problem (American Issue Publishing, ca. 1917), 33. 55 Trudel, Chiniquy, 216. 56 Ibid., 308. Bid, Le Clerge, 33, calls the temperance societies the most notable of the socio-religious societies founded during the 18405 to further ultramontane goals.

209 Notes to pages 43-7 TEMPERANCE IN UPPER CANADA AS ETHNIC SUBTERFUGE

This essay is adapted from a chapter of my unpublished PhD dissertation at the University of Ottawa, "Eastern Upper Canadian Perceptions of Irish Immigrants, 1824-1868." I am grateful to my cosupervisors, Cornelius Jaenen and S.R. Mealing, for their assistance in revising earlier drafts of this paper. See also "The Secret Agenda of the Upper Canadian Temperance Movement," in Dorothy Duncan and Glenn J Lockwood, eds., Consuming Passions: Eating and Drinking Traditions in Ontario (Willowdale, Ont.: Ontario Historical Society 1990), 157-83. 1 Donald H. Akenson, "Ontario: Whatever Happened to the Irish?" in D.H. Akenson, ed., Canadian Papers in Rural History 3 (1982): 207, 209. 2 1870-71 Census of Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Agriculture 1873), 1:350-1, 358-63, 372-3. 3 Elizabeth Malcolm, "Temperance and Irish Nationalism," in F.S.L. Lyons and R.A.J. Hawkins, eds., Ireland under the Union: Varieties of Tension (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980), 69. 4 Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber 1971), 62. 5 Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang 1978), 56-7. 6 J.K. Chapman, "The Mid-Nineteenth Century Temperance Movement in New Brunswick and Maine," Canadian Historical Review 35, no. i (1954): 437 Brockville Recorder, 19 Jan. 1830, 2. 8 Queen's University Archives (hereafter OKQAR), Journals of the Reverend William Bell, Perth, June 1817, 2:18. 9 National Archives of Canada (hereafter NA) RG 5, AI Upper Canada Sundries, reel €-4609, 58:30028. 10 Brockville Recorder, 11 Aug. 1831, 3. 11 NA MG 9, D7, Rideau Methodist Circuit, Minutes, 1823-56, 16. 12 M.A. Garland and James J. Talman, "Pioneer Drinking Habits and the Rise of the Temperance Agitation in Upper Canada Prior to 1840," Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records 27, no. 3 (1931): 178. 13 NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel €-4605, 49:24422-33. 14 Ibid., reel 0-4607, 55:27801-4. 15 Norman Longmate, The Waterdrinkers: A History of Temperance (London: Hamish Hamilton 1968), 12. 16 NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel 0-4616, 75:39907-10. 17 Ibid., reel €-6865, 88:48798-800.

2io

Notes to pages 47-52

18 Lucien Brault, Ottawa Old and New (Ottawa: Ottawa Historical Information Institute 1946), 55. 19 For the U.S., see Johnson, Shopkeeper's Millennium, 55; for Ireland, Malcolm, "Irish nationalism," 70; for Scotland, T.C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950 (London: Collins 1986), 139-40; for Nova Scotia, Ernest J. Dick, "From Temperance to Prohibition in igth Century Nova Scotia," Dalhousie Review 61 (1981): 530-1; and for Upper Canada, Malcolm Graeme Decarie, "The Prohibition Movement in Ontario, 1894-1916," PhD, Queen's University 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

!972/ 5Garland and Talman, "Pioneer Drinking," 359. Ibid., 341-64; and Decarie, "Prohibition Movement." Dick, "Temperance to Prohibition," 533-4. Charles R. Wood, "The Historical Development of the Temperance Movement in Methodism in Canada," BD, Victoria University 1958. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 93. Johnson, Shopkeeper's Millennium, 55-61. James M. Clemens, "Taste Not; Touch Not; Handle Not: A Study of the Social Assumptions of the Temperance Literature and Temperance Supporters in Canada West between 1839 and 1859," Ontario History 64, no. 3 (1972): 142-60. Jean Burnet, "The Urban Community and Changing Moral Standards," in Michiel Horn and Ronald Sabourin, eds., Studies in Canadian Social History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1974), 298-325. Janet Noel, "Temperance Evangelism: Drink, Religion and Reform in the Province of Canada, 1840-1854," MA, University of Ottawa 1978, 61. Malcolm, "Irish nationalism," 74-7, 114. Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1962), 115, 117. NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel 04605, 49:24212-9. Marjory Whitelaw, The Dalhousie Journals, 3 vols. (Ottawa: Oberon Press 1981), 2:49. Kingston Gazette, 25 Aug. 1818, 3. Kingston Chronicle, 11 May 1827, 2-3. Brockville Antidote, i Jan. 1833, 3. Brockville Gazette, 20 Sept. 1832, 3. Brockville Antidote, 5 Feb. 1833, 3; 22 Jan. 1833, 3; Brockville Gazette, 25 Sept. 1830, 2. Brockville Gazette, 4 Oct. 1832, 3; 8 Nov. 1832, 2. NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel 0-6871, 102:58050-4. Brockville Statesman, 27 Apr. 1839, 3. Bytown Gazette, 5 Nov. 1840, 2. Brockville Gazette, 30 Aug. 1832, 2.

211 Notes to pages 52-8 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Brockville Recorder, 25 Apr. 1833, 3. Brockville Gazette, 29 Mar. 1832, i. NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel €-4545, 25:10985-7. Ibid., reel 04546, 26:11602-3. Kingston Chronicle, 27 Apr. 1827, 1-2. Brockville Gazette, 12 July 1832, 3. Brockville Recorder, 27 Dec. 1838, 2. Perf/i Bathurst Courier, 29 May 1840, 3. Brockville Statesman, 14 July 1838, 2. Brockville Gazette, 20 Sept. 1832, 3; 22 Nov. 1832, 3; Brockville Antidote, 28 May 1833, 3. 53 Brockville Antidote, 19 Feb. 1833, 3. 54 Bytown Gazette, 29 Apr. 1841, 3. 55 Isabel Skelton, A Man Austere: William Bell, Parson and Pioneer (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1947), 181. 56 Brockville Gazette, 2 Feb. 1831, 3. 57 Ibid., 12 Jan. 1831, 2. 58 Brockville Recorder, 11 Oct. 1833, 3. 59 Brockville Gazette, 26 Apr. 1832, i. 60 Brockville Statesman, 25 May 1839, 261 Perth Bathurst Courier, 15 May 1840, 3. 62 Brockville Recorder, 19 July 1833, 2. 63 Brockville Antidote, 11 June 1833, i. 64 Brockville Statesman, 21 July 1838, 3. 65 Brockville Recorder, 22 Mar. 1832, 3. 66 Ibid., 27 Dec. 1832, 3; 24 Jan. 1833, 2. 67 Gerald M. Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1963), 208. 68 Brockville Gazette, 8 Dec. 1831, 2. 69 Brockville Recorder, i Mar. 1832, 1-2. 70 NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel €-4615, 72:38284. 71 Ibid., reel €-4546, 25:11296. The pro-American sympathies are discussed in Donald H. Akenson, The Irish in Ontario (Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1984), 122. 72 NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel 0-6877, 124:68455-6. 73 Ibid., reel 06862, 80:43225-6. 74 Kingston Chronicle, 6 Apr. 1827, 3. 75 H.R.M., Brief History of St. Paul's Church, Delta, Ontario (Delta: Saint Paul's Anglican Church 1934), 7-9. 76 NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel 06876, 118:66231-3. 77 Ibid., reel 06867, 92:5127478 Cecil Houston and William Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980), 30.

212 Notes to pages 58-65 79 NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel 0-6875, 115:64798-9; reel 0-6885, 151:82784-6. 80 Thaddeus W.H. Leavitt, History of Leeds and Grenville (Brockville: Recorder Press 1879), 32. 81 NA Upper Canada Sundries, reel 0-6870, 102:57723-5. 82 W.W. Peck, A Short History of theLiquorTraffic(Toronto: Canadian Temperance Federation, nd), 5, cited in Decarie, "Prohibition Movement," 2-3. 83 Brockville Recorder, 14 July 1831, 3; and 3 Jan. 1834, 3. 84 NA MG 28 in 41, vol. 12, Henry Elliott and Son Papers, Proceedings of Grand Temple, IOGT of Canada. 85 Perth Bathurst Independent Examiner, 13 Nov. 1829, 3. 86 Perth Bathurst Courier, 4 Mar. 1836, 3. 87 Ibid., 2 Feb. 1847, 2-3. 88 Ibid., 19 Jan. 1847, 2. 89 Glenn J Lockwood, Beckwith: Irish and Scottish Identities in a Canadian Community, 1816-1991 (Carleton Place: Beckwith Township Council 1991), 244. 90 Akenson, The Irish in Ontario, 125-38. 91 Brockville Gazette, 26 Feb. 1830, i. 92 Ibid., 12 Mar. 1830, 3. 93 Brockville Recorder, 18 May 1830, 3. 94 Ibid., 3 Aug. 1830, 2. 95 Ian MacPherson, Matters of Loyalty: The Buells of Brockville, 1830-1850 (Belleville: Mika Publishing Company 1981), 143. 96 Brockville Recoder, 18 Oct. 1833, 3. 97 Ruth McKenzie, Leeds and Grenville: Their First Two Hundred Years (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1967), 171. 98 Skelton, A Man Austere, 253. 99 Perth Bathurst Courier, 11 July 1843, 3. 100 The Reverend E[dward] Denroche, An Apology for the Doctrine of Scriptural Temperance (Brockville: by the author, 1840), 7, 21. 101 Perth Bathurst Courier, 4 Jan. 1842, 4. 102 Ibid., 2 Aug. 1842, 3. 103 NA MG 23, HII i, McDonald-Stone Papers, 15 Feb. 1852 letter from Francis B. Baker, Gananoque, to his mother, 4:2555. 104 NA reel 0-11724, Census of Augusta Township. 105 Glenn J Lockwood, "Success and the Doubtful Image of Irish Immigrants in Upper Canada: The Case of Montague Township, 1820-1900," in Robert O'Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada, 2 vols. (Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada 1987), 1:336-8. 106 William J.S. Mood, "The Orange Order in Canadian Politics, 1841-1867," MA, University of Toronto 1950, 45.

213 Notes to pages 65-70

107 Brockville Gazette, 12 Mar. 1830, 3. 108 Anonymous, Protestant Jesuitism (New York: Harper & Brothers 1836), 97109 Brockville Recorder, 26 June 1845, 2-3. no Brockville Statesman, 3 Sept. 1839, 2. 111 Kingston Statesman, i Nov. 1843, 3. 112 Glenn J Lockwood, Montague: A Social History of an Irish Ontario Township, 1783-1980 (Smiths Falls: Montague Township Council 1980), 321-2. "OH, L O R D , POUR A C O R D I A L IN HER WOUNDED HEART"

Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, and to the annual conference of the Canadian Historical Association, Kingston 1991. The comments of Pauline Mazumdar, Veronica Strong-Boag, Michael Fellman, Craig Heron, Peter Oliver, and Susan Houston are acknowledged with thanks, as is the financial support of the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine, the Fulbright Foundation, and the University of Ottawa School of Graduate Studies and Research. Nicola Hamer and Lome Hammond were most helpful research assistants. 1 This passage was cited by Edith Lisansky Gomberg in "Historical and Political Perspective: Women and Drug Use," Journal of Social Issues 38, no. 2 (1982): 16. 2 For more on the temperance movement, social reform, and Canadian women, see Carol Bacchi, Liberation Deferred ? The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983); Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1991); and Sharon Anne Cook, "Continued and Persevering Combat: Ontario Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism and Social Reform, 1874-1916," PhD, Carleton 1990. 3 See Barbara Welter's classic essay, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1800-1860," American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-74. The Martha Washingtonians were a notable exception, a group of female reformers who reached out to their alcoholic sisters, providing material as well as spiritual support during the mid-i84os. By the end of the decade, however, they too began to concentrate on reform activities and personal abstinence rather than rescue work. See Ruth M. Alexander, "We Are Engaged as a Band of Sisters: Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement,

214 Notes to pages 71-4 1840-1850," Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (Dec. 1988): 763-85. 4 See Carolyn Strange, "From Modern Babylon to a City upon a Hill: The Toronto Social Survey Commission of 1915 and the Search for Sexual Order in the City," in Patterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario's History, ed. Roger Hall, William Westfall, and Laurel Sefton MacDowell (Toronto: Dundurn Press 1988), 255-77. 5 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press 1985), 261. 6 Sarah E. Williams, "The Use of Beverage Alcohol as Medicine, 1790-1860," Journal of Studies on Alcohol 41, no. 5 (1980): 546-9. The anti-liquor movements are discussed in J.K. Chapman, "The Mid-igth Century Temperance Movements in New Brunswick and Maine," in Canadian History before Confederation, ed. J.M. Bumsted (Georgetown, Ont., 1972); Ruth E. Spence, Prohibition in Canada (Toronto 1919); Richard N. Kottman, "Volstead Violated: Prohibition as a Factor in Canadian-American Relations," Canadian Historical Review 43, no. 2 0une 1962); Janel Noel, "Temperance Evangelism: Drink, Religion and Reform in the Province of Canada, 1840-1854," MA, University of Ottawa 1978; and in the other essays in this volume. 7 Catharine Bell Van Norman, Her Diary: 1850 (Burlington, Ont., 1981), Wed., 6 Feb. 8 Canada, Royal Commission on the Effects of the Liquor Traffic (hereafter RCLT), Minutes of Evidence (Ottawa 1893), vol. i, Testimony of John F. Gillis, 115. 9 Gomberg, "Women and Drug Use," 14; Colin D. Howell, "Elite Doctors and the Development of Scientific Medicine: the Halifax Medical Establishment and igth Century Medical Professionalism," in Health, Disease and Medicine: Essays in Canadian History, ed. C. Roland (Toronto: Hannah Institute 1982), 106. 10 James H. Young, The Toadstool Millionaires (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1961), 220. 11 "Government Promotion of Inebriety," Maritime Medical News 15, no. 2 (Feb. 1903): 66. 12 For more on the use of alcohol in therapeutics, see Cheryl L. Krasnick, "Because There Is Pain: Alcohol, Temperance and the Victorian Physician," Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 2, no. i (1985): 5-6. 13 "The Lancet Commission on the Medical Use of Wines: Part in, Red Bordeaux Wines," Lancet 2 (24 July 1880): 145-7. 14 [Francis E. Anstie], "On the Use and Abuse of Alcohol by Women," Practitioner 6 (Jan./June 1871): 87-9.

215 Notes to pages 74-6 15 Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (New York: W.W. Norton 1979), 62. 16 Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne," 252-3. 17 Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1988), 162. 18 Heywood Smith, "Alcoholism in Relation to Women," Quarterly Journal of Inebriety 23 (1901): 190. 19 T.D. Crothers, "Is Alcoholism Increasing among American Women?" North American Review 155 (1892): 735. 20 Norman S. Kerr, Female Intemperance (London: National Temperance Publishers 1888), 7. 21 David W. Gutzke, Protecting the Pub: Brewers and Publicans against Temperance (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press 1989), 32-6. 22 Mary C. Wilson, The Best Methods of Promoting Temperance among Educated Women (London 1901), 5. See David Wright and Cathy Chorniawry, "Woman and Drink in Edwardian England," CHA, Hz'storical Papers (Montreal 1985), 119. 23 "Tippling," Canada Medical Record 23 (1895?): 62. 24 William Bayard, "On the Use and Abuse of Alcoholic Drinks," Canadian Medical and Surgical Journal 9 (July 1881): 717. 25 Ontario, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Prisons and Reformatory System of Ontario (hereafter RCPR) (Toronto 1891), vol. 4, Testimony of James Ogilvie, 657. 26 For more on the Homewood Retreat, see Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, Moments of Unreason: The Practice of Canadian Psychiatry and the Homewood Retreat, 1883-1923 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1989). 27 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, Annual Reports of the Inspector of Gaols, Prisons and Reformatories, 1881-1920. 28 Further study is needed on the reasons for the substantial decline in women's arrests for drunkenness after 1901. Temperance education, prohibitory measures, the integration of immigrants, and the maturation of social services as alternatives to the police court were all likely influential. 29 Judy Fraser, "The Female Alcoholic," Addictions 20 (1973): 67. 30 Kaye M. Fillmore, "When Angels Fall: Women's Drinking as Cultural Preoccupation and as Reality," in Alcohol Problems in Women, ed. Sharon Wilsnack and Linda Beckman (New York: Guilford Press 1984), 22.

31 Elizabeth S. Chesser, "Inebriety among Women," British Journal of Inebriety 6 (1909): 188. 32 RCLT, i, Testimony of John F. Gillis, 115.

216 Notes to pages 77-84 33 James Edmunds, The Medical Use of Alcohol and Stimulants for Women (New York: National Temperance Society 1874), 39. 34 "Perfumed Drunkards," WCTU, Woman's Journal (Oct. 1890): 5. 35 Crothers, "Is Alcoholism Increasing?" 734. 36 Kerr, Female Intemperance, 7. 37 "Victims of Alcohol," New York Tribune,? Sept. 1886. 38 Chesser, "Inebriety among Women," 188. 39 Archives of Ontario, RG 10, Records of the Homewood Sanitarium, patient registers, admission 7 Feb. 1916. 40 Ibid., admission 11 Oct. 1902. 41 Ibid., admission 27 Dec. 1883. 42 Ibid., admission 10 Mar. 1910. 43 Agnes Sparks, "Alcoholism in Women - Its Cause, Consequences and Cure," Medical Record 52 (13 Nov. 1897): 699. See also Gomberg, "Women and Drug Use," 12, and Smith, "Alcoholism in Relation to Women," 190. 44 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Puberty to Menopause: The Cycle of Femininity in igth Century America," in Disorderly Conduct, 190. 45 Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the 20thcentury Consensus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), 20. 46 Parker is quoted in Bacchi, Liberation Deferred? 82. 47 Smith, "Alcoholism in Relation to Women," 192. 48 RCLT, i, cited in the final report of the commissioner, the Reverend MacLeod, 529. 49 RCLT, 4, Testimony of J.J. Kelso, 719. 50 RCLT, 4, Testimony of William C. Adams, 1166. 51 Lena A. Beach, "Inebriety and Use of Drugs among Women," Women's Medical Journal 16, no. 7 (July 1906): 107. 52 Chesser, "Inebriety among Women," 188. 53 Kerr, Female Intemperance, 11; Edmunds, Alcohol and Stimulants for Women, 43. 54 Edmunds, Alcohol and Stimulants for Women, 51. 55 "Drunkenness of Women and the Death of Children," Canada Lancet 31 (May 1899): 1187. 56 Thomas S. Brown, Strong Drink: What It Is, and What It Does (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros. 1877; Montreal 1884), 52. 57 "Rules for Feeding Babies," Canada Medical Record 2 (1874): 87. 58 Degeneration theory is analysed by Charles E. Rosenberg in "The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease and Social Thought in i9th Century America," Perspectives in American History 8 (1974). 59 William E. Bessey, "On the Use of Alcoholic Stimulants by Nursing Mothers," Canada Medical Record i (1872-73): 197. 60 RCLT, i, Testimony of Dr Reid, 87.

217 Notes to pages 84-9 61 Chesser, "Inebriety among Women," 187. 62 Sparks, "Alcoholism in Women," 700. 63 Kerr, Female Intemperance, 8-9. 64 RCLT, 4, Testimony of Florence Kinton, 1090. 65 RCLT, 4, Testimony of Agnes Cowan, 1090-1. For more on the Salvation Army women soldiers in Canada, see Lynn Marks, "The Hallelujah Lasses: Working-Class Women in the Salvation Army in English Canada, 1882-92," in Gender Conflicts, ed. Franca lacovetta and Mariana Valverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992), 67-117. 66 RCPR, 4, Testimony of David Archibald, 702. Women who were alcoholic and practiced prostitution to survive are discussed in Judith Fingard, The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax (Porters Lake, NS: Pottersfield Press 1989). 67 T. Doner, Eleven Years a Drunkard (Illinois 1877), as quoted in Harry G. Levine, "Temperance and Women in igth Century United States," in Alcohol and Drug Problems in Women, ed. Oriana Kalant, (New York: Plenum Press 1980), 34. 68 Welter, "True Womanhood," passim; Estelle B. Freedman, "Their Sister's Keepers: An Historical Perspective on Female Correctional Institutions in the United States, 1870-1900," Feminist Studies 2, no. i (1974): 78. 69 John B. Gough, Platform Echoes (Hartford, Conn., 1887), 278. 70 Faith Fenton, "Drunken Women's Home," Salvation Army, Rescue Notes and Anniversary Songs (Toronto 1889), i. 71 "The Report of the Inspector under the Inebriates Acts Concerning the Inmates," British Medical Journal (5 Jan. 1907): 26. See David Smith, "Drinking and Imprisonment in Late Victorian and Edwardian Scotland," Histoire SocialelSocial History 19, no. 37 (May 1986): 161-76, and Roy M. MacLeod, "The Edge of Hope: Social Policy and Chronic Alcoholism, 1870-1900," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 22, no. 3 (1967): 215-45, f°r more on British judicial measures against chronic alcoholics. 72 "Report of Inspector," 26. Ludmilla Jordanova has analysed the significance of body representation, particularly of women, in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century natural sciences; see Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the i8th and 2oth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1989). 73 Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender (London: Peter Owen [1895], 1959), 95, 129, 152-3. The theme of bastardized masculinity was revived by Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham: "Psychologically, feminism had a single objective: the achievement of maleness by the female, or the nearest possible approach to it.

218 Notes to pages 89-92

74 75

76 77 78

79

Insofar as it was attained, it spelled only vast individual suffering for men as well as women, and much public disorder." Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Grosset & Dunlap 1947), 167. See Edwin M. Schur, Labelling Women Deviant: Gender, Stigma and Social Control (New York: Random House 1984), 210. Jordanova, Sexual Visions, 22. For more on masculinity, see Peter Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes & Meier 1979). For masculinity and drinking in Canada, see Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, "Adventures in Maritime Quackery: The Leslie E. Keeley Gold Cure Institute of Fredericton, N.B.," Acadiensis (Spring 1988): 119-22. Jordanova, Sexual Visions, 22. Ellis is quoted in Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne," 279. Winnie Fraser, "The Alcoholic Woman: Attitudes and Perspectives," in Women: Their Use of Alcohol and Other Legal Drugs, ed. Anne MacLennan (Toronto: Addiction Research Foundation 1976), 45, 72. Hobbs is quoted by Fraser. The argument could be made that the designated-driver program, initiated as a public-health measure, gives free reign to the nondrivers to overindulge, which subsequently may result in domestic violence. INEBRIATE INSTITUTIONS IN NORTH A M E R I C A , 1840-1920

This is a slightly revised and expanded version of a paper that appeared under the same title in the British Journal of Addiction 85 (1990): 1187-1204, reprinted here by permission. Research for this paper was supported in part by a grant from Stop Now, Inc. to the Alcohol Research Group, Institute of Epidemiology and Behavioral Medicine, Medical Research Institute of San Francisco. Thanks for advice or assistance are due to Robin Room, Marianne Smith, Cheryl Warsh, and the following archivists and librarians: John McLeod (Public Archives of Nova Scotia); Gertrude Lebans (Anglican Diocese of Montreal); Marie Baboyant (Montreal Public Library); Syd Gosley (Heritage Museum, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia); Faith Wallis (Osier Medical History Library, McGill University); Andrea Mitchell and Judith Lubina (Alcohol Research Group); and the reference staffs of the McLennan Library (McGill University), the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley), the California State Library, the California Historical Society, and the Boston Public Library.

219 Notes to page 92 1 Samuel B. Woodward, Essays on Asylums for Inebriates (Worcester, Mass., 1838), originally published as a series of newspaper articles in 1835; for an example of Woodward's influence, see Anon., Remarks on the Utility and Necessity of Asylums or Retreats for the Victims of Intemperance (Philadelphia: Brown, Bicking & Guilbert 1840). On international treatment movements, see Jim Baumohl and Robin Room, "Inebriety, Doctors, and the State: Alcoholism Treatment Institutions before 1940," in Marc Galanter, ed., Recent Developments in Alcoholism, vol. 5 (New York: Plenum Publishing 1987), 135-74. 2 F.L. Barren, "The American Origins of the Temperance Movement in Ontario," Canadian Review of American Studies 11 (1980): 131-50; Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England (London: Faber and Faber 1971); R.D. Wadsworth, The Temperance Manual (Montreal: J.C. Becket 1847); Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800-1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1979); Alan Dawley and Paul Faler, "Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and Rebellion," Journal of Social History 9 (19?6): 466-80. 3 Harrison, Drink, 115-16. 4 There is a substantial literature on the Washingtonians. See Milton Maxwell, "The Washingtonian Movement," Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol (hereafter JSA) 11 (1950): 410-51; John A. Krout, The Origins of Prohibition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1925); Tyrrell, Sobering Up; Leonard Blumberg, "The Significance of the Alcohol Prohibitionists for the Washingtonian Temperance Societies, with Special Reference to Paterson and Newark, New Jersey," JSA 41 (1980): 37-77; Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press 1983); Robert L. Hampel, Temperance and Prohibition in Massachusetts, 1813-1852 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press 1982); Ruth M. Alexander, "'We Are Engaged as a Band of Sisters': Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840-1850," Journal of American History 75 (1988): 763-85; Leonard U. Blumberg, with William L. Pittman, Beware the First Drink! The Washington Temperance Movement and Alcoholics Anonymous (Seattle: Glen Abbey Books 1991). 5 Thomas White, Jr, An Essay on the Order of the Sons of Temperance (Montreal: J.C. Becket 1853), 4. Canadian temperance societies began to take an interest in reclaiming drunkards in the mid-i83os when they moved towards the total-abstinence philosophy. However, eighty-one-year old Thomas Dane, of Port Maitland, NS, told the Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic in 1892 that the temper-

220 Notes to pages 93-5 ance society he joined "sixty-five years ago" (ca 1827) had some members who'd been "terrible drunkards." In 1842 the Victoria Temperance Society of Montreal made the reformation of drunkards its principal aim. Probably inspired by Washingtonian methods, the Victoria Society sent forth travelling deputations to spread the faith. A study of this group would be an important contribution to Canadian temperance history. On the Victoria Society see Wadsworth, Temperance Manual, pt II, 24 and passim; for Thomas Dane's testimony see Canada, Royal Commission on the Effects of the Liquor Traffic (hereafter RCLT), Minutes of Evidence (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson 1893), 1:322-3. 6. Tyrrell, Sobering Up, 173. 7 David Harrisson, Jr, A Voice from the Washingtonian Home (Boston: Redding & Co. 1860), 77; Journal of the American Temperance Union, 22 Apr. 1858, cited in Leonard U. Blumberg, "The Institutional Phase of the Washingtonian Total Abstinence Movement," JSA 39 (1978): 1596. 8 Harrisson, A Voice; Jim Baumohl, "On Asylums, Homes, and Moral Treatment: The Case of the San Francisco Home for the Care of the Inebriate, 1859-1870," Contemporary Drug Problems 13 (1986): 395-445; T.M. Vancourt, "Brief Historical Sketch of the 'Chicago Washingtonian Home/ With Some General Remarks," in Proceedings of the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates, 1871 (hereafter FAAci), repr. (New York: Arno Press 1981), 103-15; Blumberg, "The Institutional Phase"; [D. Banks MacKenzie], The Appleton Temporary Home: A Record of Work, rev. ed. (Boston: T.R. Marvin & Sons 1876); "Inebriates Home," Alliance Journal and Temperance Advocate (Halifax, NS; hereafter AJTA), 28 July 1875, 5; St George's Church Temperance Home, Prospectus and Rules (Montreal: Witness Printer, ca 1875); "Paper on Total Abstinence," in Newspaper Clippings and Scrapbook of Bishop James Carmichael (hereafter Clippings), Archives of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, 83. 9 James Bovell, A Plea for Inebriate Asylums; Commended to the Consideration of the Legislators of the Province of Canada (Toronto: Lovell & Gibson 1862); "The Inebriates' Home," AJTA, 11 Aug. 1875, 20; David M. Fahey, The Collected Writings of Jessie Forsyth, 1847-1937: The Good Templars and Temperance Reform on Three Continents (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press 1988), 15-16. I am grateful to Professor Fahey for pointing out my omission in a previous paper of the Templars' children's work. 10 Jones, cited in Jim Baumohl, Dashaways and Doctors: The Treatment of Habitual Drunkards in San Francisco from the Gold Rush to Prohibition, PhD, University of California at Berkeley 1986, 202; "The Temperance Societies and the Inebriates' Home," AJTA, 11 Dec. 1879, unpaged.

221 Notes to pages 95-6

11 Harry Levine, "The Discovery of Addiction: Changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in American History," JSA 39 (1978): 143-74; William F. Bynum, "Chronic Alcoholism in the First Half of the igth Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 42 (1968): 160-85; R°Y Porter, "The Drinking Man's Disease: The Tre-History' of Alcoholism in Georgian Britain," British Journal of Addiction (hereafter BJA) 80 (1985): 385-96; Woodward, Essays, 1-2. 12 Edward M. Brown, "'What Shall We Do with the Inebriate?' Asylum Treatment and the Disease Concept of Alcoholism in the Late Nineteenth Century," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 21 (1985): 48-59. 13 W.E. Bessey, How To Cure Drunkenness: A Treatise on the Medicinal Treatment of Inebriety in All Its Forms with a Reference to Neurasthenia or Nervous Exhaustion (Montreal: John Lovell & Son 1880), 29-30. This was only one of several such schemes proposed in North America and elsewhere. A particularly interesting application of island therapy was the proposal of a syndicate of physicians from New York, Paris, London, and Berlin to build a "model sanitarium" for inebriates on a tropical volcanic island eleven days' sail from San Francisco. See "An Island Inebriate Home," Quarterly Journal of Inebriety (hereafter