On and Off the Wagon. Donald Barr Chidsey

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 emerged afterward, grew, and spread itself. Town after town, taking advantage of local option laws, closed its bars, and state after state, prodded by the drys, began tinkering with prohibition laws. So the United States Brewers Association at its annual convention in 1867 declared war:

      “Resolved, That we will use all means to stay the progress of this fanatical party, and to secure our individual rights as citizens, and that we will sustain no candidate, of whatever party, in any election, who is in any way disposed toward the total abstinence cause.”

      The drys, who were not cowards, accepted the challenge. What they had hitherto lacked was a national political body, a party, and they proceeded to fill this need by forming the Prohibition party of the United States in 1869. They were not in the habit of mincing words, and they applauded wildly in 1872 when their first nominee for president, James Black, defined the fight:

      “The traffic in these drinks is an illegitimate branch of commerce, and the law should so declare it. Liquor dealers should be treated as criminals, and the grogshop should be abated as a pestilential nuisance. To secure these ends the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of government must be in the hands of those favorable to such policy.”

      Black polled only 5,607 votes, but it was a beginning. At least the lines of battle had been drawn.

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      The Singing Sisters

      Dr. Lewis—Visitation bands—WCTU—Lucy Hayes

      The female sex is not easily kept out of anything it wants to get involved in, as was proved when the “women’s crusade” shook the country in the last half of the nineteenth century.

      It all started, as so many such things do, with a man, in this case a large, booming, white-whiskered physician named Dio-clesian Lewis. Dio, as his friends called him, was a versatile performer, at once a Harvard graduate, homeopath, writer, editor, physical culture enthusiast, and worker for the temperance cause. He is credited with the invention of the beanbag. He assisted in the development of the common dumbbell. He is supposed to have coined that slogan with the false but heartening message, “A clean tooth never decays.” He recommended that women wear one short skirt instead of the three, four, or five long ones that were the fashion. If the skirt was heavy, it could be held up by braces over the shoulders, and that would take the strain off the waist. Dio’s design did not catch on, perhaps because the public had already spent its spleen on the bloomer dress, after which anything else would have appeared anticlimactic.

      A strikingly handsome man with a classical profile, Dio was much in demand as a temperance lecturer. It was during a lecture in Hillsboro, Ohio, in the early 1870’s that he broached the idea of a “women’s crusade,” a descent upon the local liquor spots to annoy them until the owners consented to close down. He proposed that the groups be called “visitation bands.”

      The ladies of Hillsboro liked the idea, and they appealed to Mrs. Eliza J. Thompson, daughter of a former governor and herself a vigorous grandmother, to lead them. Some sixty women sallied forth to visit the town’s saloons, while their husbands and other men waited for them in a church and prayed for their safety. It was the middle of winter, but this did not faze the ladies. The first saloon held out for only a few hours, after which the proprietor, perhaps driven half mad by the way the women wailed, promised that he would close up, and did. The women went to the next place, and the next.

      They sang “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” Sometimes they knelt in prayer and sometimes they sat in the snow, but all the while they sang.

      They did not interfere with anybody who entered or left the saloon, and they did not set foot in that unhallowed place, God forbid. They simply sang. They sang “Ring the Bells of Heaven,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “I’ll Walk with the King, Hallelujah,” “Thrown Out the Lifeline.”

      Soon they had every saloon in town closed, after which it can be assumed that each of them went home to a hot bath.

      Women from the rest of the state and parts of Illinois and Indiana took up the idea. The Singing Sisters—as the public semiaffectionately called them—devised a pledge for saloonkeepers to sign:

      Knowing, as you do, the fearful effects of intoxicating drinks, we, the women of _________, after earnest prayer and deliberation, have decided to appeal to you to desist from this ruinous traffic that our husbands and brothers, and especially our sons, be no longer exposed to this terrible temptation, and that we may no longer see them led into those paths which go down to sin and bring both soul and body to destruction. We appeal to the better instincts of your heart, in the name of desolate homes, blasted hopes, ruined lives, widowed hearts, for the honor of our community, for our happiness, for the good name of God who will judge you and us, for the sake of your own soul, which is to be saved or lost. We beg, we implore you to cleanse yourself from this heinous sin, and place yourself in the ranks of those who are striving to elevate and ennoble themselves and their fellow men. And to this we ask you to pledge yourself.

      The saloonkeeper probably never got to the end of this tirade. He would throw up his hands in despair and sign, though he no doubt broke his word later.

      The “women’s crusade” that Dr. Lewis began never moved east or south. It died almost as abruptly as it had СКАЧАТЬ