The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition

by Bloomsbury Academic

Overview

"An absorbing and at times ironical humorous picture of the battle of Prohibition. Recommended." — Library Journal
With the passing of the Volstead Act, the United States embraced Prohibition as the law of the land. From 1920 to 1933, the well-intentioned ban of the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors gave rise to a flourishing culture of bootleggers, gangsters, and corrupt officials. This witty and perceptive history by Herbert Asbury, the bestselling author of The Gangs of New York, offers a wide-ranging survey of the Prohibition era that covers not only twentieth-century events but also the movement's inception in colonial times and its transformation into a religious crusade.
A considerable portion of Americans viewed the end of liquor trafficking as an act of obedience to God's will and anticipated a new era of peace and prosperity. Instead, a vast criminal network of black market profiteers took root, promoting a spirit of lawlessness throughout the country. The Great Illusion charts all aspects of the period's moral decline, from the activities of rumrunners who supplied speakeasies to those of crooked politicians and police who profited from the failed experiment of Prohibition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780837100081
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/30/1968
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Herbert Asbury was an American journalist and writer best known for his books detailing crime during the 19th and early-20th centuries. He is the author of The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld and Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

"The Good Creature of God"

The most intemperate era in American history began during the last half of the eighteenth century, when rum had become the principal medium of exchange in the slave trade and was nearing the peak of its importance as a factor of the colonial economy; and when whiskey, first distilled in western Pennsylvania, was beginning to be recognized as the easiest and most profitable way in which to market grain. It ended some fifty years after the Revolution, by which time American drinking habits had been somewhat modified by the first waves of European immigration, and the anti-liquor movement had begun to assume the character of a religious crusade, the basis of its strong appeal to the American people.

During this period of some eighty or ninety years, "the good creature of God," as liquor was called in some of the colonial laws, was considered a prime necessity, an indispensable part of clean and healthy living. It was a common article of diet, in many places almost as much so as bread, while even physicians looked upon it as a preventative of all diseases and a specific for many. Everybody drank — both sexes and nearly all ages. The aged and infirm sipped toddies of rum and water — heavy on the rum; babies were quieted by copious doses of a mixture of rum and opium, and so spent their infancy in a happy fog; and able-bodied men, and women, too, for that matter, seldom went more than a few hours without a drink. The occasional abstainer was considered a crackpot and generally shunned. An article in the Old American Encyclopedia (1830 edition) thus described drinking customs in colonial times:

A fashion at the South was to take a glass of whiskey, flavored with mint, soon after waking; and so conducive to health was this nostrum esteemed that no sex, and scarcely any age, were deemed exempt from its application. At eleven o'clock, while mixtures, under various peculiar names — sling, toddy, flip, etc. — solicited the appetite at the bar of the common tippling-shop, the offices of professional men and counting rooms dismissed their occupants for a half hour to regale themselves at a neighbor's or a coffee-house with punch, hot or cold, according to the season; and females or valetudinarians, courted an appetite with medicated rum, disguised under the chaste names of "Hexham's Tinctures" or "Stoughton's Elixir." The dinner hour arrived ... whiskey and water curiously flavored with apples, or brandy and water, introduced the feast; whiskey or brandy and water helped it through; and whiskey or brandy without water secured its safe digestion, not to be used in any more formal manner than for the relief of occasional thirst or for the entertainment of a friend, until the last appeal should be made to them to secure a sound night's sleep. Rum, seasoned with cherries, protected against the cold; rum, made astringent with peach-nuts, concluded the repast at the confectioner's; rum, made nutritious with milk, prepared for the maternal office. ... No doubt there were numbers who did not use ardent spirits, but it was not because they were not perpetually in their way. ... The friend who did not testify his welcome, and the employer who did not provide bountifully of them for his help, was held niggardly, and there was no special meeting, not even of the most formal or sacred kind, where it was considered indecorous, scarcely any place where it was not thought necessary, to produce them....

This sort of drinking was the fashion, not only in the South, but virtually everywhere else in America, even in New England. The Puritans passed laws forbidding nearly everything that gave the people pleasure, but let liquor alone, except for the usual regulatory statutes and the ordinances against drunkenness. Whatever their other faults, or virtues, may have been, the Puritans were hard drinkers, as well as being the first distillers of rum in this country. As early as 1630 John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, who arrived that year with seven hundred Puritan settlers, recorded in his journal that he had "observed it a common fault with our grown people that they gave themselves to drink hot waters immoderately." A hundred and fifty years Boston manufactured and consumed more rum than any other city in America, while in the back country of Massachusetts the thirst for ardent spirits was so great that farmers frequently sold their wheat for rum in the fall and winter, and in the spring and summer traveled forty or fifty miles to get bread. An early colonial versifier wrote of the New Englanders, specifically of the men of Derry, New Hampshire:

It was often said, that their only care, And their only wish, and only prayer, For the present world, and the world to come, Was a string of eels and a jug of rum.

The custom of closing offices and business establishments each morning at eleven o'clock so that everyone could get a drink — known as Leven O'clock Bitters — prevailed throughout the country, and in most of the colonies there was a similar stoppage of work at four in the afternoon. These practices were also observed when the people assembled for such public and communal tasks as haying, reaping, barn-raising, woodcutting, and building and repairing highways. On these occasions liquor was free to all, and enormous quantities were consumed. For instance, when a group of citizens of Schenectady, New York, held a woodcutting bee in 1748 to lay in the local minister's winter supply of fuel, the men who did the sawing and chopping drank five gallons of rum and a half gallon of wine.

Workmen commonly received part of their wages in rum or other ardent spirits, and were given stipulated days off for sprees, or, as most work agreements frankly phrased it, "to get drunk." It was well-nigh impossible for a farmer who didn't provide plenty of liquor to get farm hands to work for him; it was generally agreed that no man could do a day's work on a farm without alcoholic stimulation. Slaves were likewise given large and regular rations of liquor. Business conferences began and ended with slugs of rum, while liquor flowed almost continuously at social functions. Grocers and other merchants kept barrels of rum on tap for customers who came in to settle their accounts or to buy large bills of goods; it was good manners to get groggy on these occasions. Meetings of town and village officials, and even court sessions, were frequently held in the taverns, so that the lawmakers and judges could be close to the source of inspiration. An old New Hampshire court bill, dated April 15, 1772, shows that on that day the judge had been supplied with a bowl of punch, two bottles of wine, and a mug of rum flip, at a cost of eight shillings two-pence. A jury bill of the same date shows the expenditure of fourteen shillings fourpence for eleven dinners, five mugs of flip, and two mugs of cider. A mug of flip, incidentally, varied in quantity from a pint to a half gallon.

The result of all this, of course, was a great deal of drunkenness. As the Old American Encyclopedia put it, "sots were common in both sexes, of various ages, and of every condition." Some of the gentlemen seem to have been rare old topers. The Rev. Mason L. Weems, celebrated inventor of Washington legends, published in 1812 a curious pamphlet called The Drunkard's Looking-Glass, in which he reproduced a tavern bill, dated April 1, 1812, for one day's drinking and feasting by Mr. Thomas C:

3 mint slings before breakfast, 25 cts $0.75
There was never any shortage of hard liquor; almost every tavern, except the backwoods joints, carried sufficient potables to satisfy even such splendid appetites as that of Mr. C., who was by no means unique. Applejack, better known as Jersey Lightning, was plentiful, and so was gin, popularly called Strip and Go Naked, or Blue Ruin, which sold for a few pence a quart. Because of its cheapness and startling impact — it was of a higher proof in those days — gin was the favorite drink of slaves and servants. It was frequently mixed with beer, and sometimes with a raw, cheap rum called kill-devil; or with blackstrap, a mixture of rum and molasses. These concoctions would have appalled even the most hardened veteran of prohibition speakeasies, but they were drunk with relish by those who couldn't afford anything better. They probably offered the quickest way to achieve temporary paralysis ever devised.

By far the most abundant liquor, however, was rum. The prosperity of New England, especially of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, was largely founded upon rum. The first rum used in this country was imported from the West Indies, where it was distilled to absorb surplus molasses production; domestic distillation on a large scale began when a shipload of molasses was brought into Rhode Island late in the seventeenth century. Distilleries were soon in operation throughout New England, and by the early years of the eighteenth century rum was being manufactured in great quantities for the slave trade. At first the dealers on the African slave coast sold a prime Negro for a few gallons of rum, but eventually, as rum became cheaper and more plentiful, the price of slaves rose to two hundred and fifty gallons each, and the business became unprofitable. Meanwhile rum had become an important article of commerce; during the few years preceding the Revolution more than six hundred thousand gallons were shipped abroad annually, while large supplies were sold for domestic consumption. The industry continued to expand, and as late as 1807, although whiskey had become popular in the East, forty rum distilleries were operating in Boston. At one time so much rum was available in the Massachusetts metropolis that it sold at retail for fourpence a quart. West Indies rum, supposed to be better than the New England product, was only twopence more.

2

The taverns and tippling houses, where the middle and lower classes did most of their heavy drinking, and where the rich bought the bulk of their supplies for home consumption, rapidly increased in numbers as liquor became cheaper and more plentiful. Time has cast a patina of glamour over the drinking resorts of early America; many historians appear to be under a compulsion to describe them as places of mellow charm, presided over by a "fat and genial host," serving the choicest of food and drink, and frequented by the most important men of the day, who gathered before the great fireplace each evening to engage in wise and witty talk over bowls of flip and noggins of toddy.

Such a description may have fitted some of the taverns of the seventeenth century, when licenses were granted only to men of good character and reputation, and when the tavern keeper, operating the only place of public resort in the town or village, enjoyed great prestige and high social standing. In most places, in fact, he was ranked above the local clergyman. But the flood of rum changed the picture; when drinking became more profitable, the issuance of a license was determined by political and other considerations. A lower class of men gradually acquired control of the trade, and a new type of resort began to appear — the dramshop and the gin mill, housed in rude shacks and attracting thieves, ruffians, loafers, and other ornaments of a developing underworld.

The character of the tavern likewise declined; there was so much quick money to be made in the sale of liquor that other features of the establishment were neglected. The taverns of the eighteenth century, except for a few first-class houses in the larger towns of the East, were usually dirty and frequently disorderly, while the accommodations were generally unsatisfactory. The food, nearly everywhere, lacked variety, and was poorly prepared and served. Private sleeping quarters were almost unknown; travelers customarily slept two, three, and even four together, removing only their coats and shoes and fighting a losing battle throughout the night with the original inhabitants of the bed, fleas and bedbugs. By the middle of the eighteenth century the places where liquor was sold in this country had already acquired many of the characteristics of their successor, the saloon, and had begun to present a problem which was destined to plague American lawmakers for two hundred years, and for which a solution, in fact, has not yet been found. A description of eighteenth-century drinking resorts which John Adams, second President of the United States, recorded in his diary in 1760, has a curiously modern note:

But the worst effect of all, and which ought to make every man who has the least sense of his privileges tremble, these houses are become the nurseries of our legislators. An artful man, who has neither sense nor sentiment, may, by gaining a little sway among the rabble of a town, multiply taverns and dramshops and thereby secure the votes of taverner and retailer and all; and the multiplication of taverns will make many, who may be induced to flip and rum, to vote for any man whatever.

In fifty years Adams could see no improvement. He wrote to a friend in 1811 that he was "fired with a zeal amounting to enthusiasm against ardent spirits, the multiplication of taverns, retailers, dramshops and tippling houses, and grieved to the heart to see the number of idlers, thieves, sots, and consumptive patients made for the physician in these infamous seminaries."

3

Throughout the era when rum was so abundant, it was almost the universal beverage, especially of the middle classes. Rum was to be found everywhere. A jug of rum, flanked by a pitcher of water and a box of sugar, occupied the place of honor on every sideboard, and many taverns sold nothing else. The wealthy classes drank it, too, but they varied their liquid diet with imported brandy; arrack, a distillation of rice and molasses which came from the East Indies; and such famous wines as madeira, canary, port, and malaga, which were mixed with milk and sugar to form a summer drink called sillibub. Domestic wines were available in some localities, but were not first-class. Rum was used in a great variety of ways — straight, hot, and cold, buttered, with water and sugar, and as the principal ingredient of flip, sling, punch, and toddy. These were the most popular mixed drinks, although there was also, in the higher classes of society, a fairly large consumption of mead, a fermentation of honey and water; and of metheglin, made of honey and yeast.

The most famous of colonial drinks was rum flip, made by combining rum, beer, and sugar, about two-thirds beer. The mixture was then stirred with an iron poker, called a loggerhead, which had been brought to a cherry-red heat in the fireplace. When it began to boil, it was drinkable. Properly prepared, rum flip had a slightly bitter, burnt taste, and was very potent. An evening over a bowl of rum flip frequently ended in a brawl, and the loggerheads came in handy to settle disputes. From this came the expression "at loggerheads." Rum sling was made of rum and water, about half and half, with a little sugar added. A toddy was basically the same as a sling, except that lemon juice was used if available. Punch was usually concocted of spices, rum, and lime or lemon juice, with sugar or sirup. It was served both hot and cold.

Cider was the second most popular drink, and was almost as plentiful as rum; a cider press was part of the equipment of every farm, and of many town and village households as well. Since the apple is not native to the American continent, cider was unknown in the colonies for a good many years, except for a few barrels imported from England. But extensive orchards were planted, and soon began to yield fruit. By the early 1700s cider sold in the larger towns at from six to eight shillings a barrel, retail. During the pressing season from six to thirty barrels of cider were laid in by each family, according to size and circumstances, for winter consumption. Very little was used sweet, except by the few moderate drinkers and total abstainers; most people considered that cider was scarcely potable until it had got hard; and the harder the better.

The date in which the distillation of whiskey began in this country has not been preserved, but it was probably around 1760, just in time to play a part in the great wave of intemperance. Whiskey first appeared in western Pennsylvania, where it was distilled by the farmers for their own use. Production on a fairly large scale started when the farmers discovered that a horse could carry four bushels of grain to market over the rough trails of the western country, but could carry the whiskey made from twenty-four bushels. At the time of the Whiskey Insurrection in 1794, which occurred when the federal government imposed an excise tax of nine cents a gallon on all distilled spirits, it was said that every family in western Pennsylvania operated its own still. Whiskey began to spread elsewhere in the country during the Revolution, when it was issued as a ration to troops of the Conti- nental Army at times when good rum was unobtainable. Long before whiskey was used to any large extent in the East, it was a popular tipple throughout the West. In some localities prices of goods were quoted in whiskey, and the liquor was used as currency. A keg of whiskey was an important part of the provisions of every flatboat which went down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It was placed in the center of the boat, with a tin cup chained to it, and any member of the crew, or any passenger, could help himself whenever he felt the need of stimulation. The flatboatmen, very rugged characters, always drank it straight, although it was as raw as any liquor could well be.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Part One
One "The Good Creature of God"
Two Genesis
Three "Interpose Thine Arm"
Four "Whirlwind of the Lord
Five "Born of God"
Six "The Devil's Headquarters on Earth"
Seven "Burying Congress Like an Avalanche"

Part Two
Eight " A New Nation Will Be Born"
Nine "An Era of Clear Thinking and Clean Living"
Ten A New Moral Tone for Braodway
Eleven Where the Booze Came From
Twelve Smugglers Afloat and Ashore
Thirteen What America Drank
Fourteen Prohibition's Fairest Flower
Fifteen The End of the Noble Experiment

Bibliographical Note
Footnotes
Index