Liquored Up

BRIAN: hosts, the story that Sarah tells us takes us through the end of the American Revolution. I’m looking at a bunch of numbers here, and they tell us at that point in 1790, the average American drank 5.8 gallons of pure alcohol per year. So Ed, bring us into the 19th century. What happens next?

ED: Well, you know, as robust a tradition we have of drinking in Colonial America, the 19th century really takes it to a new level. It turns out that whiskey is a great thing to produce from all that corn they can grow on the new farms of the West. And that whiskey not only saturates the West, but it flows back to the East, where people are buying it in the cities and towns of the East.

And as a result, we see, in the very beginning of the 19th century, a huge spike in drinking. And so by the 1830s, the average American is drinking seven gallons of pure alcohol every year.

BRIAN: Oh, come on.

ED: A big increase. Yeah, that’s even more than back in the late 18th century.

BRIAN: Seven gallons? You know, Ed, I’m looking at this chart of alcohol consumption. It seems to bear out exactly what you’re saying, at least up to the 1830s. But then there’s this incredible drop-off. In 1840, alcohol consumption is less than half of what it was 10 years earlier. So yet again, I got to know what’s going on.

ED: It’s the age of extremes there in the 19th century, Brian. No sooner does the market bring all this cheap whiskey into America’s homes and communities than people begin to worry about what it’s doing. It wreaks havoc in many ways, as you can imagine.

It’s not unlike, really, the sudden appearance of crack or other drugs that really distorts social life. When Peter was talking about people drinking cider, people talking about drinking all day long, they were really living and working together. But in the 19th century, you begin to see the genders separated. You begin to see work and leisure separated. And you begin to see a lot of binge drinking.

And so women are looking at this, and just distraught about what this sea of alcohol is doing to the families and communities in which they live. Fortunately, they have a new tool at their command. They’re in the evangelical churches that believe that you can reform the world around you, as well as prepare yourself for the world to come.

People can see that the conversion experience can lead people from being drunkards to being teetotalers overnight. And they think if this works so powerfully inside the church, what might it do in society as a whole? They begin to create new reform organizations that will take that same evangelical zeal of reaching out to make new recruits from abstinence from alcohol.

This is something new in the 19th century. Not merely moderating your intake, but stopping altogether. Once this takes root, people see: as powerful as the churches are, and as powerful to reform organizations are, if we could enlist the state, we could have even greater progress in bringing alcohol to heel.

So in Maine in 1851, they banned alcohol altogether. And by 1855, 12 more states have enacted similar laws. It’s impossible to enforce Prohibition in the 19th century. They don’t really have the machinery of the state to do that.

And the Civil War, as you can imagine, just disrupts all of this. The amount of suffering and the amount of alcohol, the number of men who are all together, really just kind of turns that whole impulse on its head. And a lot of laws ultimately get repealed. But the idea that the state can help people avoid the evils of booze, that sticks around.

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