On and Off the Wagon. Donald Barr Chidsey
turned down Jeremiah’s offer of wine and preferred for reasons of their own to live under canvas instead of in houses. Their American namesakes, all of whom took the full abstinence pledge, were formed not into chapters and lodges but into tents.
The entire temperance movement appeared to be on its way to success. Nothing, it seemed, could stand before it. By the middle 1850’s, thirteen states had some manner of statewide prohibition, and local option, a form of armed truce, was being tried in many widely scattered places.
During the forties and fifties waves of immigrants streamed into the United States, some of them from Scandinavia but most from Ireland and Germany. The Irish liked their whiskey, the Germans their beer. The Germans, who were skilled brewers, set up plant after plant. As early as 1850 there were 431 breweries in the United States; ten years later, 1,269 breweries were producing more than a million barrels a year. New York and Pennsylvania had 85 percent of them, for the Germans, like the Irish, stayed largely in the cities.
The Irish for their part banded together to call from the old country the amazing Father Theobald Mathew, a priest who had done wonders in getting those at home to ride the water wagon by the thousands. He came over in 1850, and for about a year and a half he preached indefatigably. Traveling some 37,000 miles under the most rugged conditions, Father Mathew signed up almost 500,000 pledgees. His biggest bag was in St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, where he accepted 12,000 promises at one time. These pledges were probably Catholics, and that was all right. But most of Father Mathew’s converts were Protestants, and when he demanded that they kneel, and when he made the sign of the cross over each one, there was a great deal of muttering and dark rumors of a Roman takeover, a Vatican encroachment upon Washington. On the whole, however, Father Mathew was a success, and was even invited to the White House by President Zachary Taylor.
It was at about this time that the fancy saloon, with the mahogany bar, the brass, and the cut glass decanters, began to replace the grubbier taproom. The saloon purveyed beer, though not exclusively. It was a clubhouse, a place to meet, a place in which to talk and sing, a favorite place of the Germans in particular. At first even the drys thought the saloon an improvement over the tavern. It was not long, however, before the saloon became the drys’ number one object of hatred, their bete noire.
The drys were working as hard as ever, their speeches and prayers just as impassioned, when slavery became the greater issue of the decade, splitting the country in half.
Most abolitionists were as a matter of course prohibitionists, but as the conflict approached they had less and less time to give to the temperance movement. Susan B. Anthony, for instance, started her career as a teacher and temperance worker. She moved to the antislavery cause when it became more imperative, and after the War Between the States she and her friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were largely occupied with the equal rights movement. Temperance was supported by Miss Anthony through her long and active life, but it was a side issue.
Many dry workers feared that southerners would link the two crusades, temperance and abolition, to the detriment of both. The southerners did exactly that. The local option campaign, which had gotten off to a good start below the Mason- Dixon Line, ground to a halt. By the time the guns started booming at Fort Sumter, the dry cause had been all but forgotten the country over—except by a dedicated few. But those few would fight on.
CHAPTER SIX
The Lines of Battle
Internal Revenue Act—
U.S. Brewers Association—Prohibition party
When a nation goes to war, the generals strap on their swords, the bands play, the crowds before the newspaper offices cheer or stand silent as each new bulletin is posted, and a small group of men in Washington look at one another and ask, “Now, just how are we going to pay for all this?”
There was no national debt in 1861, no deficit, and no income tax. The federal government got along well enough on tariff returns. But a war was something else again. Wars are expensive.
Twice the government had imposed a tax on the manufacture of spirits. The first time resulted in the short-lived Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. The second was a War of 1812 act, and like the first was a temporary, emergency measure. Neither was popular nor notably successful. And neither had touched upon beer, the brewing of which in those days had been of little consequence. The situation in 1861 was quite different. Distilling had become a major industry, and brewing could only be described as a colossus.
The statesmen put their heads together and came up with an internal revenue bill that set a license fee of twenty dollars a year on all retailers and a tax of one dollar a barrel at the brewery and twenty cents a gallon at the distillery. Neither the distillers nor the brewers, who had expected something of the sort, made any objection. They had no machinery with which to make an objection heard, anyway. But the temperance people objected—and shrilly. Until this time they had confined their activities to churches and lecture halls, to towns and state capitals. Now they registered their protest on a national scale.
Why should the drys, of all people, oppose a federal tax on liquor and beer? They had good reason.
The tenor of the drys’ argument was that government taxation of the beer and liquor industries was tantamount to government recognition of the legitimacy of those industries. To temperance workers the alcohol business was an evil per se, and the miscreants in Washington had no more cause to deal with distillers and brewers than with murderers, traitors, bigamists. Such a tax would give the government a stake in the alcohol industry, and that was like having a stake in the devil. What the whole thing amounted to, the drys cried, was that the federal government was lending its name as a shield for the wickedness that was alcohol, and this was wrong, wrong, wrong, any way you looked at it. They were vehement. They hammered the point with an assiduity that was virtually sacerdotal. Whenever they referred to the saloon, it was “the legally protected saloon.” And they insisted the saloon was the very entrance to hell.
But the nation needed the money, so the bill was passed.
A few months after President Lincoln had signed the Internal Revenue Act, the drys’ gloomiest fears were confirmed. The malt beverage manufacturers of the country got together and set up a permanent organization, the United States Brewers Association.
The drys now had a palpable villain, and they made the most of it. The brewers in truth had acted openly enough, but the drys yelled “conspiracy.” The adjective they used most often when referring to the association was “nefarious,” but “scheming,” “avaricious,” “subversive,” and “treacherous” were favorite descriptions, too.
The brewers were serious men who had come together for their own protection and without the least thought of being insidious. A friend, Congressman J. W. Killinger, advised them to go to Washington in person rather than hire a lawyer there. They did so, and because they were humble and straightforward they made a good impression. They offered their services to the government in any capacity deemed fitting. They dispatched a committee to Europe to study methods of beer taxation there, and they made this committee’s report available to the proper authorities in Washington, who valued it. They cooperated in many other ways. They did, of course, make an effort to have the tax reduced, and for a while the tax was cut from one dollar to sixty cents a barrel, but the original tax was soon restored.
As far as the drys were concerned, the distillers and the brewers were one, a hateful single enemy, in spite of the fact that the distillers, some three hundred of them, did not organize until 1879, and the distillers and the brewers did not form an allegiance until 1882. The truth was that the brewers were somewhat leery of the distillers, with whom they had little in common except the enmity of the drys. The brewers did not like to think of themselves as dealers in alcohol. They might shake their heads and cluck their tongues at the sight of a man who staggered under the influence of too much schnapps, but what did that have to do with them? Beer was one of life’s blessings. They simply could not understand the dry people’s looking on them as out-and-out criminals.
Nevertheless, the brewers could recognize a clear and present danger when confronted with one. And the drys, they noted, were waxing belligerent. Almost swamped by the Civil War, the dry cause