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CHAPTER FOUR

Schism in Zion

Moral suasionists—Maine law—

Early temperance societies—

Direct actionists

The temperance movement began slowly and had its origins at the local level. The indignation of the first groups of men to campaign against liquor was genuine enough, but feeble when compared to the torrent of outraged opinion that was to follow. They had a cause but not yet a holy crusade. They called themselves moral suasionists, in contrast to the direct actionists who came close upon their heels and who favored laws and still more laws. The suasionists felt sorry for the drunkard and hoped to redeem him from sin; the actionists gave him up.

As far back as the middle of the seventeenth century, Richard Mather was sputtering against drunkenness from his Dorchester, Massachusetts, pulpit, as his son Increase was to do after him, and Increase’s son Cotton after him. These men made no attempt to influence the law. They did not need to. In their own small world they were the law.

Another clergyman, mild of manner but as granitic in purpose as any of the Mathers, was Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, who would have no truck with “Sabbath-breakers, rum-selling, tippling folk, infidels and ruff-scuff,” and whose move in 1810 from East Hampton, Long Island, to Litchfield, Connecticut, is accepted by some historians as the real and proper beginning of the temperance movement in America. (Nobody ever used the word “prohibition” then, or even thought of it.) Soon afterward Dr. Beecher gave six sermons on intemperance from his new pulpit, sermons that were printed and reprinted many times. Today these sermons are collectors’ items, but in their time they were monuments of the dry cause, which always was to lean heavily upon the printing press.

Dr. Beecher’s daughter, Harriet, was given to writing against excess at the table or in the tavern, too, but her tracts, though able enough, never caused much of a stir. It was not until she tried her hand at a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin that she scored.

Another important temperance figure was Mason Locke (“Parson”) Weems, an Episcopal clergyman who wrote for many religious periodicals. His The Drunkard’s Looking Glass: reflecting a faithful likeness of the drunkard, in sundry very interesting attitudes went into six editions. He was even more fortunate with what is generally acclaimed as his masterwork, The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington. This book started slowly in the marketplace. In 1806, however, as it was about to go into a fifth edition, Weems rewrote it, inserting an invention of his own. With the addition of the hatchet-and-cherry-tree story, Weems’s biography sold more than eighty- five editions.

The great William Holmes McGuffey was also a temperance man. It should be noted, however, that Dr. McGuffey never let his ideas show in McGuffey’s Readers, which sold, all in all, some 122,000,000 copies. His opinions on drinking, though pronounced, were kept private.

Another phenomenally successful author who espoused the temperance cause was Timothy Shay Arthur, who wrote Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There, which has been called the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the temperance movement. The book was published in 1854 by three Philadelphia firms, J. E. Bradley, J. B. Lippincott Company, and Grambo & Company. It was bound in black with a touching scene stamped in gold on the front cover, a scene that showed little Mary Morgan grasping her father’s arm and the words, “Father come home!” Priced at seventy-five cents, it sold by the scores of thousands. Later, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room was well received as a play.

Arthur was probably never in a barroom. He would hardly have had the time. Besides all his committee work in the temperance cause, he was one of the most prolific writers in the history of American literature, turning out hundreds of sketches, plays, novels, novelettes, guidebooks, and tracts. He was the editor and publisher of Arthurs Home Magazine.

At about this time another play about the evils of liquor achieved enormous popularity, and today it still draws large audiences. The Drunkard, written by W. H. Smith and produced in 1844, takes place in a barroom, too, and it was a record breaker. A recent revival in Los Angeles ran for nine years.

Legislation in the cause of temperance was no more than statewide for a long while, and it was intended only to curb the small-time drinker. In 1838 Massachusetts passed a law stipulating that nobody could buy at one time in one place less liquor than fifteen gallons, which had to be paid for promptly and carted away without any of it being consumed on the premises. The law did not work, and two years later it was repealed. Maine considered a twenty-eight-gallon law, which missed by only one vote. Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Mississippi experimented unsuccessfully with similar laws. In Georgia the Fleurney movement, which would have made unlawful all retail sales of liquor, was defeated by a narrow margin.

It was not until 1851 that Maine, thanks in large part to a dapper, short, shrewd man named Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, passed and made stick an absolute statewide prohibition law, the first in the United States proper. (Maine had passed weaker laws between 1837 and 1846, and there had been one in Oregon in 1844, but that was directed at the Indians, and anyway Oregon was not yet a state.) The Maine law created a furor. Anywhere in the country, in any tavern, meetinghouse, or church, you could stir up an argument about the Maine law. The controversy became a noun—Mainelawism. Proponents of the law declared it was a blessing of God, whom they thanked each night on their knees for Neal Dow the miraculous. It was these yammerers, the opponents said, who started the expression that as Maine goes so goes the nation. The men who liked their liquor called the advocates of the law, naturally, Maine-iacs.

The first formal gathering of citizens who advocated temperance took place in Saratoga, New York, in 1808. In 1813 a temperance society was formed in Massachusetts, and in 1826 the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was founded in Boston. These were among the first temperance organizations. The movement grew rapidly; by 1833 there were approximately six thousand temperance societies in the country, with more than a million members.

On November 2, 1832, President Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war, Lewis Cass, signed an order abolishing the Army’s spirits ration. Cass was a dry. After he was elected to the United States Senate in 1845, he organized and became the first president of the American Congressional Temperance Society, which included members from both houses of Congress. Soon afterward most of the state legislatures formed similar organizations.

In some temperance societies, as the activists began to gain the upper hand over the moral suasionists, new members had to sign the full pledge, forswearing wine as well as ardent spirits. The suasionist members were permitted to remain, but the secretary would jot initials after each member’s name to differentiate, thus—“O.P.” (old pledge) or “T” (total). Some believe that this is how the word “teetotaler” got into the language.

The fundamentalist-liberal debate of a later time was foreshadowed in these squabblings. The moral suasionists protested that they did not personally like wine, but they could not find it in their consciences to condemn it as wicked per se. These differences never were to be settled one way or the other. Neither side would give an inch. The spirit of accommodation and compromise never brushed the temperance movement in America.

After all, the moral suasionists said, wine was mentioned many times in the Good Book.

The activists retorted with quotations from persons they introduced as scholars, to the effect that when the Bible spoke of wine it meant, simply, unfermented grape juice.

The suasionists, ordinarily staid men, at this point were forced to snicker. Would you, then, they asked, read in Genesis, chapter 9, that Noah drank of the unfermented grape juice? Was that why he took off all his clothes? There were more than two hundred references to wine in the Good Book, they reminded the activists. Were all of them mistranslations? Did Paul instruct Timothy to stop drinking water only, but use a little unfermented grape juice for his stomach’s sake? Would one cry with Joel: “Howl, all ye drinkers of unfermented grape juice”?

This made the activists angry, but they put their heads down and fought on, for the spirit of the Lord was in them. They saw no reason to wail over a sot, who was already lost. One drink, they declared, and a man was doomed. But what of the young people? What of the innocent?

When the activists started the no-license movement—it should have been called the no-new-license movement—they were trying, for the first time, not to win men away from whiskey but to keep whiskey away from men. Thus, they reasoned, there would soon be no more of those filthy saloons. They could have been right. They surged well ahead of the moral suasionists, and it began to look as though they might get their way.