Rumming with the Devil

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hi, Brian.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: Hey, there, Brian.

MALE SPEAKER: Smashed.

MALE SPEAKER: Blitzed.

MALE SPEAKER: Blasted.

MALE SPEAKER: Soused.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Sloshed.
MALE SPEAKER: Plastered.

MALE SPEAKER: Buzzed.

MALE SPEAKER: Schnockered is one.

MALE SPEAKER: Fustigated?

FEMALE SPEAKER: Spifflicated?

ED: Liquored up.

PETER: Crocked.

BRIAN: Not quite myself.

ED: That’s all? If we’re going to do this, we might as well get three sheets to the wind, baby.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Three sheets to the wind. [SINGING] Three sheets to the wind.

MALE SPEAKER: Absolutely soused.

PETER: Yes, today on our show, we’re talking about one of America’s very favorite pastimes: drinking. And if you’re looking for some fresh ways to describe a spot of New Year’s tipsiness, well, we’re here to help. Or rather, Ben Franklin is. When it comes to dreaming up synonyms for drunk, he’s still the guy to beat.

BEN FRANKLIN: Addled, afflicted, bewitched, been at Barbados, cramped…

PETER: In 1776, Franklin published The Drinker’s Dictionary, a kind of a single-subject thesaurus with more than 200 variations on the theme.

BEN FRANKLIN: He’s quarrelsome, like a rat in trouble. He’s fishy, fuddled, sore-footed, as good conditioned as a puppy, got a brass eye, got on his little hat, in the suds…

ED: Now, we don’t have to point out that drunkenness also has a very dark side, and that also has deep roots in American history. So today on our show, we’re going to figure out why America’s relationship with alcohol seems so schizophrenic. On one hand, we seem all excess. On another, all about abstinence. We’re going to try to figure out how those two things relate.

BRIAN: Hey, Peter. You know all those synonyms that Franklin rattled off? I mean, somebody who could come up with that many names for being drunk, he had to be awash in alcohol. How much did people drink back then?

PETER: Well, a whole lot, Brian. It was common for everybody—men, women, children, too—to start their day with a class of hard cider. By 1770, the average white woman here in Virginia was drinking a pint of the stuff each day. The average white male was drinking the equivalent of seven shots of hard alcohol each day.

I sat down with historian Sarah Hand Meacham, who’s written about alcohol in the Colonial Chesapeake. And I asked her, why did people back then drink so much?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: There’s really nothing else to drink. The water is filled with insects, blood from—

PETER: Nice.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: —killing animals. [LAUGHS]. I can’t think of a better way to say it.

PETER: OK, OK. How about milk?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: Well, the cows weren’t bred the way they are today. They didn’t have as much milk. And cows sometimes grazed on Jimson weed, which gave people milk sickness, a serious illness.

PETER: Energy drinks? [LAUGHS]. Something like this. Seriously. Fruit drinks, come on.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: No, there are naturally-occurring airborne yeasts that make any open fruit juice turn alcoholic. So there’s really very little to drink other than alcohol.

PETER: So where did they get their alcohol?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: They are mostly making it. And one of the surprising things, something people don’t always realize, is that it was mostly women’s work to make it. Back in England, where most of the colonists were coming from in this region, at least the free colonists, they were drinking ale and beer. And back then, ale didn’t have hops, and beer did have hops, but all made from wheat.

Wheat was just too much trouble to grow in the Virginia region, where you could make so much profit from tobacco. And so what they do is they revert back to older ways of having women make cider.

PETER: So, Sarah, you’re describing a culture in which everybody, all the time, is drinking. They’re drinking in the fields. They’re drinking first thing in the morning. It’s not just cider. It’s any old thing that they’ve fermented.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: They are. Mm-hm.

PETER: So there must’ve been a lot of drunkenness, it stands to reason. People are imbibing so much. So is there a drinking problem, or why don’t people see it?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: There do not seem to have been any concerns about drunkenness in the 18th century, in 18th century America. Generally speaking, people drank differently in the 18th century. They’re drinking it throughout the day, so it’s a little bit different, and they’re very accustomed to it.

And there really don’t seem to have been concerns about drunkenness. It’s true that they do describe people occasionally as drunk for court cases, where somebody will be at court, and the justices will throw someone out for being so drunk, that he called the justices, “you rotten, vile dogs.”

PETER: Just telling the truth, right?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: [LAUGHS]. But they don’t do anything to them. They just say, “go sober up and come back.”

PETER: Now we period specialists tend to think that the American Revolution changes everything. It’s a new world.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: It did change everything.

PETER: Yeah. Would it be a new and more sober world? Or what changed in the world of alcohol?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: Ah. It’s going to be a more sober world for some people, and a less sober world for others.

PETER: Whoa.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: So part of what happens during the American Revolution is that in 1781, George Washington decided to change the daily rations. Up until then, the Continental Army had gotten their supplies the same way that English armies traditionally had. They went from place to place, and the local housewives came out. They set up stalls. And they sold food and liquor to the Army.

But this creates all sorts of problems. People fall in love. People get active in other ways. And a lot of children were produced.

PETER: [LAUGHS]. OK.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: And so what happens is that George Washing gets, I think understandably, very frustrated, where he has all of these sort of women trailing along with the men. He has all these children trailing along. They’re eating food that could be for the soldiers. And Washington’s trying to figure out ways to make a more professional army.

PETER: But it’s not the drunkenness of the soldiers so much as their sex lives that seems to be bothering George Washington.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: That’s true. Washington is not particularly concerned about their drunkenness. And in fact, Washington was incredibly concerned that soldiers were not getting enough to drink. The soldiers are supposed to get the equivalent of at least three shots of rum per day or a pint of cider per day.

PETER: One pint of cider is just half of what a woman Chesapeake woman would have drunk.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: That’s right. It’s not nearly enough for a fighting man. And in fact, men fighting the American Revolution are supposed to get extra rations of alcohol if they actually fight that day—right before battle, so that they’re really geared up.

But if it rains, they get double rations. The problem is that Washington can’t provide all this alcohol that on paper, the men are supposed to get. And so he makes a switch in 1781. He says, from now on, we’re going to have rum provided on year-long contracts. So instead of having all these women set up stalls, and have the men go and get their own alcohol, we’re going to have army-supplied rum to the fighting men.

PETER: So this is a key moment in—

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: This is a key moment.

PETER: —in the transition toward a more industrialized market based on alcohol culture.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: It is. And I think it also helps teach American men, these new creatures, American men, that American men drink distilled liquor made by other American men. It really leads to the masculinization of alcohol. But at the same time, there’s another shift, which is the emphasis on tea-drinking.

And once we get the rise of tea and the availability of tea in America, particularly sort of trickling down in the 1760s, 1770s—

PETER: I like that image, the dripping.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: [LAUGHS]. The trickling. Part of what happens is that finally, Americans have something else to drink. Right? The tea is safe. Tea has water that is boiled. It is flavored with the tea leaves. And so now, people who have time to make a cup of tea have something to drink that isn’t alcohol. And that’s when we begin to get the inkling that there might be something wrong with drinking alcohol all the time. That there might be something wrong with being drunk.

PETER: That’s Sarah Hand Meacham. She’s a Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, and her book is called Every Home A Distillery, Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake.