Kindergartners were taught to chant, tremble, King Alcohol, we shall grow up. Older children studied texts filled with lurid misinformation calculated to terrify. Just one drink, some books alleged, could burn away the lining of the throat and stomach and begin eating away at the liver and kidneys.
Little Johnny has one drink, and the next picture he's lying in the gutter unconscious. One of their most notorious things is they had
diagrams of body parts. You would have a diagram of the stomach. And then they had a diagram of an inebriate stomach, and what happens to you. Well, the inebriate stomach was full color.
Alcohol caused deafness, dropsy, lunacy, they claimed-- not only in those who swallowed it, but in their children and their children's children.
And always, some textbooks warned, there was the fearful possibility that drinking could spark spontaneous combustion, bursting suddenly into fatal blue flame. Millions of children came to believe it all, and it would not be too long, Willard prayed, before they all were old enough to vote.
"In America, ballots are bayonets. You think maybe The Crusade is dead and its banner trailing in The Dust? I tell you, no.
In The Saloons, Life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs. And there was an atmosphere of greatness.
Here was something more than the common everyday where nothing happened. Here, Life was always very live, and sometimes even lurid. Terrible, saloons might be. But then that only meant that they were terribly wonderful."
-- Jack London.
Despite The Washingtonians, despite The Woman's Crusade and The WCTU, despite legions of clergymen and Temperance lectures and school books meant to terrify, more and more saloons were opening every day in America. By the turn of the new 20th century, there would be some 300,000, as varied as the people who patronized them.
For millions of working men, saloons were a refuge from long hours at a clerk's desk or on a factory floor, or deep in a coal mine.
And from the responsibilities represented by The Family waiting at home. The brass rail was more than a foot rest, one man remembered. It was a symbol of Masculinity-emancipate, of Manhood free to put its feet on something.
"They were places where people got up and sang songs. They were places where The Laughter went on and on. And The Assumption was, they worked so hard during the week, if they thought Friday belonged to Them and The Boys, why not? You know, that was part of The Deal. It was essential to their survival that to get through a tough life and hard times, particularly for The Immigrants in this strange country, you know, that's not quite yours, I think it was essential to them that they have this."
The saloon is so many different things to different people. If you lived in a squalid tenement house, it was your living room. It was your social club. It was maybe where your translator was. Your bartender was there to watch out for you. Your bartender might have done a lot more for you than the local priest did, or the local cop.
Beer and whiskey were not The Saloon's sole attraction. A Man could cash his paycheck, pick up his mail if he didn't yet have an address of his own, read the paper, learn English, play cards or billiards, find out who was hiring -- even get himself a City job. Big city saloon keepers often doubled as politicians, doling out patronage positions.
In 1890, 11 of New York's 24 aldermen ran bars. In East Boston's ward two, an Irish immigrant's son named Patrick J. Kennedy use profits from two saloons and a wine and spirits import business to begin to build the political machine that would one day help put his grandson into The White House. Unions met in saloons. So did veterans groups, fraternal organisations, and immigrant associations.
Ballots were cast in them. Wakes were held. And so were christening parties.
They were the working class private clubs. The uptown white Anglo-Saxon Protestants had their clubs for the same reasons, you know, except that they were talking about, How would you like to buy Venezuela? But it was the same essential thing that there were contacts going on in these rough places.
And the majority of them were not buckets of blood, as they called them. They were not places where you walked in and you were hauled out by an ambulance. They were much more clubs. Most of them had basic rules-- pay your debts, vote the straight ticket, that sort of thing.
Regulars may have seen their corner taverns as familiar neighborhood businesses. But more often than not, they actually belonged to one or another of the big brewers. Brewing companies owned the saloons. And if Pabst opened a saloon on this corner, Busch was going to have one on this corner and somebody was going to have one on this corner and this corner. And the cities were overwhelmed by the brewery-owned saloons.
By agreeing to sell just one brand of beer, almost anyone could go into the saloon business. The brewery paid for his license, provided the pool table and artwork, the bar and bar stools-- even the spittoons-- everything needed to keep its beer flowing.
They would do anything to sell beer. The free lunch? You say there's no such thing as a free lunch? Well, in the 1890s and a couple decades after, the free lunch was something that was served in nearly every saloon. You would go in and you would get your cheese and your salami, and your sardines and your saltines. And what do these things have in common? They're incredibly salty.
And so you would drink a lot of beer. It was a wonderful marketing device.
Decent citizens were appalled that most big cities had a carefully delineated district in which vice, although technically illegal, was tolerated-- a place where pimps and thugs and strong-arm men worked hand in hand with corrupt cops and accommodating politicians. And all of them were centered around saloons. In Manhattan, it was the Midtown Tenderloin, denounced by reformers as Satan's circus. New Orleans had its Storyville. San Francisco, the Barbary Coast.
In Seattle, it was named for the street along which lumbermen skidded logs to the docks before looking for a place to have a drink -- Skid Row. In Chicago's notorious Levee District, 20 square blocks on the south side, there were said to be 500 saloons, 500 whorehouses, 56 pool rooms, 15 gambling halls, and too many peep shows and cocaine parlors and bawdy theaters to count. All of it was overseen by a flamboyant saloon keeper and democratic committee man, Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna.
He had a tavern, and he was the alderman of the first ward. And of course, if you don't think that's a conflict, to own a tavern and be the alderman at the same time. But he controlled the levee. And of course, if you controlled the Levee, you controlled all the votes. They could elect Mickey Mouse because they'd tell you who to vote for. And they did.
It fostered a lot of corruption. The bar became completely intertwined with politics in a lot of cities. So you could buy votes with a whiskey and a cigar. You could always make the argument that the saloon was a place where morals were loose, where prostitution was a danger, where people were taken advantage of.
My great grandmother remembers as a child walking the streets of Philadelphia and crossing the street so she would not have to cross in front of a saloon, because it was so scary-- the noises that were coming out of it, the men lying in the gutter in front of it-- that was the face of alcohol consumption.
One of the terrifying stories of my childhood was my mother telling me what it was like-- she was an Irish immigrant-- growing up in Hell's Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan-- of the men who would be paid on Saturday afternoon and taking it directly to the saloon-- coming home drunken, abusive, with all the money gone. And the mother trying to figure out how she was going to hold
the family together, how the children were going to be fed. And as a little boy, identifying myself with those children, I wondered how I was going to be fed.
The only way to solve the problem of drunkenness, many believed, was to get rid of the saloon.
When I went to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, there were seven dives where drinks were sold. I began to ask, why should we have the saloon when Kansas was a prohibition state, and our constitution made it a crime to manufacture, barter, sell, or give away intoxicating drinks? These dive keepers really were not as much to blame as the city officials who were in league with this lawless element, and could see the wicked walking on every side, and the vilest men exalted. Carrie Nation.
Carrie Nation's life was filled with tragedy. Her mother died in an insane asylum, convinced she was Queen Victoria. Her first husband drank himself to death. A second unhappy marriage would end in divorce. She determined to give herself over to the struggle against what she called "the place where the serpent drink crushed the hopes of my early years," the saloon.
Kansas had already banned the sale of alcohol in every one of its 105 counties. But the state's dusty cow towns and large cities alike were filled with thirsty men, and no one paid much attention to The Law. As President of the Barber County WCTU, Carrie Nation had led peaceful marches that had had little effect, wrote letters to legislators and lawmen that were never even answered, and eventually became convinced God wished her to Do more.
"On the 6th of June, 1900, before retiring, I threw myself downward at the foot of my bed and told The Lord to use me in any way to suppress the dreadful curse of liquor. I told him I wished I had 1,000 lives, that I would give Him all of them. And I wanted Him to make it known to Me in some way. The next morning before, I awoke, I heard these words very distinctly -- Go to Kiowa, and I'll stand by you."
The next morning, with an armload of what she called "smashers," rocks and bottles wrapped in paper to look like harmless packages, she strode into a saloon in Kiowa.
I told the owner, Mr. Dobson, get out of the way. I don't want to strike you, but I'm going to break up this den of vice. I began to throw at the mirror and the bottles below the mirror. Mr. Dobson and his companion jumped into a corner, seemed very much terrified. From that, I went to another saloon, until I had destroyed three.
The other dive keepers closed up, stood in front of their places, and would not let me in. By this time, the streets were crowded with people. One boy, about 15 years old, seemed perfectly wild with joy. I have since thought of that being a significant sign, for the smash saloons will save the boy.
She dared the sheriff to arrest her. He did not. She moved onto Wichita, to attack the most opulent solution in town, the bar in the Hotel Carey. When a policeman arrested her there for defacing property, she shouted at him, "I am defacing nothing. I am destroying. You put me in here a cub, she said from behind bars. But I will go out a roaring lion.
And I will make all hell howl.
