Class and Social Order
Although there was no general pattern in alcohol consumption throughout Western society during the nineteenth century—it rose in some countries and fell in others, and there were regional and demographic variations in all—a common thread in alcohol discourse throughout Europe and North America was the association of alcohol abuse with the growing industrial working class. Alcohol became the focal point of many anxieties, whether they concerned social and economic changes or shifts in values and behavior. It was held responsible for sickening or killing its consumers, for ruining families, and for causing behavior as varied as prostitution, suicide, insanity, and criminality. Historically, as we have seen, alcohol has been blamed for many social ills, but the tendency went further in the 1800s (see Chapter 10) as many critics abandoned the temperance solution—the notion that moderate drinking was the answer—and embraced the idea of total abstinence, whether voluntary or coerced. One of the innovations underpinning this shift in policy was the provision of safe drinking water to many urban populations. This technological and material development, driven by concerns for public health and ideas about personal and social hygiene and morality, provided one of the bases for the radical antialcohol movements of the nineteenth century.
Until the nineteenth century, when a statistical revolution put masses of more reliable data into the hands of Western states and from there into the hands of historians, our sense of alcohol production and consumption remains just that: a sense. But from the middle of the 1800s, and in some places a little earlier, we have fairly reliable figures of production and taxation, and we can infer broad levels of consumption. They show that there was no pattern common to Europe and North America as a whole. In the most general terms, and without considering regional variations, the consumption of alcohol in England rose steadily during the 1800s; in the United States it declined from the 1840s, while in Germany it rose from the 1850s and declined twenty years later. Beer and brandy were the most popular alcohols in Germany; many French consumers turned from wine to spirits from the 1870s, while the English balanced beer and spirits. But uniting all these variations was a common discourse among published commentators: whether or not alcohol consumption was rising—and even if it were falling—urban working people (the stress was on working men rather than on women) were drinking far too much, and something had to be done about it.
This belief reflected middle- and upper-class anxiety about the speed and scale of social and economic changes in the 1800s. Population rose rapidly in most countries, and the number of large cities multiplied dramatically as economies began to industrialize. The cities teemed with tens of thousands of workers whose public and often alcohol-fueled sociability unnerved the better-off classes, who could afford to drink themselves into subdued rowdiness or simple insensibility in the privacy of their homes, clubs, and other gathering places. Although there are no reliable statistics on differences in drinking behavior between country and town, it is likely that city dwellers, most of whom were workers, consumed alcohol at higher rates. Taverns and bars were certainly more common in cities, and men gathered in these places after work and on weekends. While this might conjure up an image of boisterous sociability, alcohol must also have provided a liquid haven from the hard-working lives of these men. Women, who lived equally hard (if not harder) lives, were generally barred from these drinking places, and they consumed their alcohol in what passed for privacy in their homes. It is notable that although pre-1830 antialcohol campaigners routinely discussed excessive drinking by women, the rise of notions of domesticity seems to have led to women’s drinking becoming culturally invisible. From the 1830s, temperance campaigners focused resolutely on drinking by male workers.1 One commentator noted that the English aristocracy “have very much improved in their drinking habits” and that the alcohol problem was concentrated in the “vicious classes,” the lower classes.2
A general belief that the working classes were afflicted by alcohol abuse is reflected by the concern among Australian employers that the migrants they attracted were “respectable” and “of good character.” One advertisement seeking migrants for South Australia specified, “We want no idlers here—no drunkards. But steady, sober men, who are not ashamed to live ‘by the sweat of their brow,’ will be welcomed.” The application form that would-be migrants had to fill out had to be signed by two “respectable householders” who could vouch for the applicant’s character, but the form specified, “This is not to be signed by Publicans or Dealers in Beer or Spirits.” To get migrants off on the right footing, some of the ships used to bring migrants from England to Australia (a grueling four-month voyage) carried no alcohol and were known as “temperance ships.” Others provided alcohol for sale to passengers, whether they were traveling first class, second-class intermediate, or third-class steerage. A banker, traveling first class on an 1835 voyage, described his fellow passengers as “the most inveterate drunkards, fit only for a penal settlement.”3 It is not clear which category of passenger he was referring to, but the rhetoric (and the suggestion of criminality) echoes contemporary upper-class attitudes toward working-class drinking.
Much of the increase in alcohol consumption can be attributed to distilled spirits. It became common in the nineteenth century to make a distinction between “natural” beverages, such as wine and beer, and their “industrial” counterparts, such as distilled spirits. The distinction, which is difficult to justify, helped temperance campaigners in France and elsewhere defend wine while they condemned spirits (as Benjamin Rush had done at the end of the 1700s). For them, it was obvious that wine was a natural product. It was made in the country, and grape-growing was a form of agriculture; all the winemaker did was press the grapes and let nature take its course. (There was a debate in nineteenth-century Germany over adding sugar to grape juice to raise the potential alcohol level. Opponents of the practice began to refer to their unsugared wine as “natural.”)4Spirits, on the other hand, were produced at urban distilleries that looked like factories. Smoke poured from their chimneys, and horse-drawn carts delivered the raw material (grain) and carried the finished product out. Even though spirits long pre-dated the Industrial Revolution, they became thought of as the mass-produced alcohol of industrialism, and it seemed appropriate that many industrial workers rallied to them.
Although French workers consumed most of their alcohol as wine, an increasing percentage was represented by spirits. On a per capita basis, Parisians drank about 2.9 liters of pure alcohol from spirits in the early 1800s, but the figure rose to 5.1 liters in the 1840s and 7.3 liters at the end of the century.5 The English working classes certainly adopted spirits (generically called “gin”) in the early nineteenth century. If England had a “national drink,” it was beer, but the output of breweries scarcely changed during the first three decades of the 1800s, even though the population rose by almost a third in the same period. On the other hand, the consumption of spirits almost doubled, from between 3.7 and 4.7 million gallons a year in the first half of the 1820s to more than 7.4 million gallons each year from 1826 to 1830.6 Governments by this time were starting to collect and pay attention to statistics, and they noted this trend in alcohol consumption with alarm. In 1830 the British parliament passed a Beer Act designed partly to steer workers back to the more nutritious national beverage, partly to appease workers at a time of economic hardship, and partly to weaken the near-monopoly (85 percent of production) that the twelve biggest breweries had over beer in England.7 Under the Beer Act, any householder who paid a small fee of 2 guineas (a little more than 2 pounds) could brew beer and sell it on their own premises. The only restriction was that they had to close at 10:00 PM, unlike public houses, which could stay open at any hour, except during church services.
Within six months, 24,000 of these beer-houses had opened all over England and Wales, and many thousands more opened in the following year, so there was a bar in almost every neighborhood. It is likely that alcohol had never been so readily available. The Beer Act also repealed the taxes on strong beers and cider, which immediately reduced the price of beer by about a fifth. Under these circumstances, consumption could have been expected to rise, although it is difficult to calculate production, with so much of it deregulated and untaxed. But there was no doubt in the minds of solid middle- and upper-class citizens that drinking had increased, and within hours of the Beer Act coming into effect, there were complaints about beer-generated debauchery, idleness, and criminality on the part of the workers. The Reverend Sydney Smith reported, “Everybody is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.”8 Others were soon describing the ravages the Beer Act had wrought on families and portrayed the beer-shops as havens for prostitutes, criminals, and radicals. There are echoes here of the allegations against gin and the dramshops a century earlier.
By the end of the 1830s, more than 40,000 beer-houses were licensed under the act in England and Wales, almost as many as the 56,000 public houses then in operation. That might have been anticipated, given the small cost required to open a beer-house. But if one of the intentions had been to turn gin-drinking workers into beer-consumers, it had only partial success. Faced with competition from the beer-houses, which offered quite basic furnishings and only beer, many of the public houses renovated their drinking spaces and began to offer spirits as well as beer. With comfortable furnishings and sometimes musicians for entertainment, they became known as “gin-palaces” and were said to have stimulated yet another wave of gin-drinking.
Attention was focused squarely on the working classes, as a parliamentary committee made clear: “The vice of intoxication has been for some years past on the decline in the higher and middle ranks of society; but has increased within the same period among the labouring classes.”9 As a result, the Beer Act was revised in 1834 to raise the license fee by 50 percent, to give police the right to search beer-shops, to require owners to have a certificate of “good character,” and to divide beer-shops into two classes: those that sold beer to be consumed on the premises and those selling beer to be consumed elsewhere. The former were to display a sign that read, ambiguously, “To be drunk on the premises.” In 1869 the licensing of beer-houses came under the control of local magistrates, and their number declined steadily.
The beer-houses became the center of a broader debate on the state of the working classes in nineteenth-century England. Polemicists such as Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator, blamed the government and employers for creating such conditions of life and work that workers could be excused for finding relief in sexual and alcoholic excess. Even so, whether the contributors to the debate were hostile or sympathetic to workers, all assumed that there was a high level of consumption and frequent intoxication on their part. The statistics certainly show that sales of alcohol well outpaced population growth: from 1824 to 1874, England’s population grew by 88 percent, but beer sales rose by 92 percent, spirits distilled in Britain by 237 percent, foreign spirits by 152 percent, and wine by 250 percent.
While the working classes represented the great majority of the British population and must have contributed to the increased consumption of spirits and wine, these figures do not and cannot tell us whether the increase was greater among workers than among middle- and upper-class drinkers. Wine and spirits, as well as tea, had become the common beverages of the better-off by the middle of the 1800s. One French doctor reported that heavy drinking took place at all levels of French society but that patterns and circumstances varied by class. Workers, generally living on poor diets, tended to drink heavily on a regular basis but also drank “enormous” volumes of brandy in periodic binges. Heavy drinkers in the upper class, on the other hand, were better-nourished and tended to avoid binge-drinking. The working-class pattern, he found, was more likely to manifest as diseases of the liver,10 and it is possible that the overrepresentation of workers in some disease categories reinforced the prevailing belief that workers generally drank more than their social superiors. An influential 1872 work declared that excessive drinking was concentrated among beggars, vagabonds, criminals, and workers.11
In France, another factor came into play in drinking patterns: a tiny, yellow aphid called phylloxera that devastated the country’s vineyards from the 1860s and caused a dramatic reduction in French wine production for several decades. Phylloxera aphids are indigenous to North America, where native grapevines are resistant to them. But when they arrived in France in the 1850s and 1860s on the roots of American vines brought over for experimental purposes, they soon migrated to European vines that had no resistance to them. Distressed and dying vines were first identified in southern France in the early 1860s, and by the 1890s phylloxera had devastated vineyards throughout France’s major wine regions, including Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Rhône Valley. From France the disease spread throughout the rest of Europe’s vineyards; it reached Spain in 1873 and Italy in the 1880s and then spread (on imported vines) as far afield as California, Peru, and Australia. Unable to eradicate it, French scientists eventually developed a way of dealing with phylloxera—by grafting European vines onto the resistant American rootstock. But by then Europe’s wine industry had suffered a serious, if temporary, setback.
French wine production suffered more than that of other European countries, which quickly adopted the grafting solution that French scientists had taken years to discover. Throughout France, the land planted in vines decreased by about a third, with some regions losing as much as four-fifths of their vines. French wine production fell by half between the 1860s and 1880s, and production did not fully recover until the early 1900s. The result was a shortage of wine for two decades, despite success in expanding wine production in France’s North African colony Algeria and the widespread adulteration and diluting of wine. Wine made from imported raisins and then blended with red wine from the south of France made up about a tenth of the wine on the French market in 1890.
Phylloxera was a mixed blessing for the French wine industry. It did short-term damage but also led to more rational relocation and replanting of vineyards. Meanwhile, the need to rebuild France’s wine market and to reassure domestic and foreign consumers that they were getting real wine, rather than some phylloxera-era concoction, led to the adoption of an early form of Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, which was designed to guarantee the provenance and quality of wine.12 But over the short term, consumers of French wine turned to other beverages—other alcoholic beverages, that is, for there is no evidence that many seized the opportunity to became water-drinkers. In Britain, the shortage of French wine stimulated the production of whiskey in Scotland. In the United States, the California wine industry was taking off just as vines in France started to die, and the completion of the continental railway enabled wine-drinkers in the cities of the eastern United States to replace French wine with Californian.
In France itself, alcohol consumption had climbed steadily during the century. In the 1840s, each adult consumed an average of 19 liters of alcohol from all sources (wine, beer, and distilled spirits), and that rose to 25 liters in the 1870s and 35 liters in 1900. It stabilized at that level for the next fifty years, making the 1800s a period of significant growth. Even so, these global figures conceal important variations, not the least important of which was gender: men drank far more alcohol than women. There were also significant regional variations, with higher-than-average consumption in areas where alcohol was produced: the beer and spirits-producing northeast and the wine-producing regions of the south and southwest.13
Wine was an important component in the alcohol intake of the French, but it was more important in the south, where the bulk of it was produced and where it represented most of the alcohol consumed. In the northern half of France, beer and spirits played a more significant role. The volume of wine on the market varied, sometimes dramatically from year to year, depending on the harvest. Average wine production between 1805 and 1840 was about 37 million hectoliters, and that rose to 48 million in 1852–62 and 52 million in the 1870s, before falling under the impact of phylloxera. In the 1880s, only 30 million hectoliters of wine were produced each year, just 60 percent of the volume of the previous decade, and in the 1890s, output was 36 million hectoliters. From that point, production began to return to pre-phylloxera levels.14
Faced with a shortage of wine, many French wine-drinkers turned also to beer and distilled spirits, and the production of spirits (made from grain, beets, and molasses) doubled between 1870 and 1890. One of these spirits was absinthe, the first alcoholic beverage to be banned outright in many countries. Absinthe is made by macerating the leaves and top part of the wormwood plant, along with ingredients such as anise and fennel, in distilled alcohol, and then distilling it again. In its most popular form, it is a bright green liquid that turns to a cloudy yellow when water is added—commonly by being poured through a cube of sugar sitting on a special slotted spoon.
Absinthe was first introduced to France in the 1840s, in the backpacks of soldiers returning from the war of conquest in Algeria, where it had been used as a cure for dysentery, fever, and malaria. It became popular in the bistros and bars of Paris in the 1860s and 1870s, when five o’clock in the afternoon, the time after work when people drank absinthe, became known as l’heure verte, or “the green hour.” It was quickly associated with the cultural elite, with Vincent Van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Paul Verlaine, Guy de Maupassant, and Edgar Degas being high-profile consumers. Absinthe was celebrated in many French paintings of the later 1800s, especially in the cabaret paintings of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.
What gave absinthe such fame (or notoriety) was the belief that it was not only an intoxicant—and a potent one, because the alcohol level was often well above 40 percent—but also a hallucinogen. The active ingredient is thujone, a derivative of wormwood, and the effects of drinking absinthe were described as more akin to a drug like cocaine than to other alcoholic beverages. It was credited with being an aid to cultural inspiration, a quality that seemed to explain its popularity among artists, novelists, and poets, although the hallucinogenic qualities have undoubtedly been overstated. For one thing, the alcohol level of absinthe was generally so high, and the level of thujone generally so low, that most consumers would pass out from the alcohol before feeling the effects of the thujone.
Critics of absinthe portrayed its drinkers as nothing more than drug-takers, and they pointed to its addictive and other harmful qualities. In an 1890 novel called Wormwood, the main character, an absinthe-drinker, sums up his life this way: “I am a thing more abject than the lowest beggar that crawls through Paris whining for a sou!—I am a slinking, shuffling beast, half monkey, half man, whose aspect is so vile, whose body is so shaken with delirium, whose eyes are so murderous. . . . At night I live;—at night I creep out with the other obscene things of Paris, and by my very presence, add fresh pollution to the moral poisons in the air.”15 Absinthe addicts were said to have a characteristic hoarse and guttural voice, glazed eyes, and cold, clammy hands.
Just as the production of wine, one of the mainstays of France’s bars, cafés, and bistros, started to decline because of the phylloxera epidemic, alcohol consumption in France was given a boost. Through the 1850s and 1860s, the policy of Emperor Napoleon III had been to reduce the number of bars, because they were often places where people gathered to debate political issues. Between 1851 and 1855 alone, the number of bars and bistros selling alcohol in France fell from 350,000 to under 300,000, but it rose to more than 360,000 by the end of the 1860s as regional administrators failed to enforce the law. But in the 1880s, just as wine supplies were falling, the liberal government of the Third Republic made opening a bar even easier, and by the early 1890s the number of drinking establishments swelled to 450,000—one for every sixty-seven inhabitants in France. Competition led some owners to offer more than the basic level of service common in the great majority of bars. They installed counters made of zinc, offered a wider range of drinks, and even hired women to serve the drinks.
With wine in short supply, absinthe production rose, and soon it became the drink of choice among workers in Paris and other major cities in France. The increase in absinthe consumption was nothing short of staggering; it rose from 700,000 liters in 1874 to 36 million liters by 1910, a few years before the French government banned production. This volume was small compared even to the reduced wine production of the time, but because absinthe was so much more alcoholic than wine and was considered a much more dangerous drink, the increase in production and consumption was deplored by social critics, the medical profession, and the clergy. There were reports that per capita consumption of pure alcohol in France tripled between 1850 and 1890 and that it was largely accounted for by the increased consumption of brandy, absinthe, and gin.16
Before long, the campaign to ban absinthe was ratcheted up to levels never before applied to any kind of alcohol, even gin in England in the early 1700s. A few medical voices insisted that absinthe might be used to combat depression and “nervous irritability,” but the weight of opinion was clearly that absinthe was a danger to the moral and physical health of the drinker and a menace to society. At temperance meetings, guinea pigs and rabbits were fed pure absinthe, after which they had convulsions and died. In 1901, lightning struck one of the Pernod company’s absinthe plants and a vat exploded. Burning alcohol flowed out, and the fires burned for days, vividly demonstrating the elevated alcohol content of the beverage.
But what really galvanized the campaign to prohibit absinthe was an event in Switzerland four years later. Jean Lanfray, a peasant born in France and known to be a heavy drinker, murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters, apparently because his wife had failed to wax his boots. Although Lanfray regularly drank six bottles of wine a day, attention was focused on his additional penchant for absinthe. When Lanfray was tried, his lawyer argued that he had shot his wife and children while in an “absinthe-induced delirium.” His massive intake of alcohol via wine was considered irrelevant, as wine was considered benign. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Lanfray committed suicide, but by then his case had developed political dimensions. Local pressure led the Swiss government to hold a referendum on absinthe in 1907, and although few people participated, 23,000 voted in favor of banning absinthe and 16,000 voted against. The prohibition on its sale in Switzerland encouraged antiabsinthe campaigners elsewhere.17
The outbreak of the First World War, in 1914, provided the political conditions for the banning of absinthe. The first years of the war witnessed a wide range of restrictions on alcohol of all sorts. In order to reduce drunkenness among workers so as to maintain wartime productivity, the alcohol level of beer was ordered to be lowered. At the same time, alcohol production was reduced to save grain for bread, rather than beer and spirits. Wartime conditions also enabled governments to enact policies they hesitated to implement in peacetime, and one of the early wartime acts of the French government, in March 1915, was to ban the production of absinthe, still a popular working-class beverage.
The working-class associations of high alcohol consumption in the 1800s were by no means confined to Europe, as we have seen. In the United States, the period from 1790 to 1830 is thought to have seen far more alcohol consumed on a per capita basis than any other time in American history: each American over the age of fifteen years is estimated to have consumed at least 6.5 gallons of pure alcohol at this time, a volume that was more than halved (to between 2 and 3 gallons) between 1850 and the early 1900s.18If these estimates of trends are generally accurate, two shifts need to be explained: the high level of alcohol consumption to 1830 and its sudden decline and stability for the next eight decades.
The high intake of alcohol from 1790 to 1830 is generally attributed to the widespread drinking of American whiskey. Rum had been the beverage of choice through much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but during the American War of Independence, the British cut off supplies of rum and molasses from their colonies in the Caribbean. Americans turned to whiskey made from locally produced corn and rye, and soon whiskey was regarded as a patriotic drink, much as gin had been in England after the accession of William IV in 1688. As if to demonstrate whiskey’s status, George Washington, the republic’s first president, had five corn whiskey stills operating on his estate at Mount Vernon. Corn whiskey was especially attractive because settlement in the American Midwest had produced such a glut of the grain that whiskey could be sold for 5 cents for a fifth of a gallon, equal to a modern standard bottle of spirits.
Although Americans also drank cider and beer (and a little wine), whiskey became the beverage of choice in the early republic, and whiskey-drinking attracted the attention of moral and social reformers. They blamed whiskey for crime, poverty, and family violence, and employers pointed out that workers arrived at work drunk and ruined expensive equipment. In 1829 Secretary of War John H. Eaton, lamenting the incidence of heavy drinking in the army, declared, “The practice of indulging in the use of spirituous liquors is so general in this country that there is not, it is believed, one man in four among the laboring classes who does not drink, daily, more than one gill [about 4 ounces]; and it is from these classes that our army is recruited.”19
Recruits to the army might well have been solid drinkers before they joined, but the army did little to change their behavior. Following the British practice of providing soldiers and sailors with a daily ration of alcohol, Congress authorized a military beer ration at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. In 1782 it was replaced by a gill of whiskey, with George Washington arguing, like the good distillery owner he was, that “the benefits arising from moderate use of strong Liquor have been experienced in all Armies, and are not to be disputed.”20 Each soldier’s annual allotment amounted to 13.6 gallons (about 4.5 gallons of pure alcohol), so that the military ration amounted to about two-thirds of the estimated 6.5 gallons of pure alcohol that Americans are thought to have consumed annually at this time. This did not include additional whiskey rations provided to soldiers on fatigue duty or in bad weather, or any additional alcohol that soldiers were able to obtain from civilian merchants. Later attempts to substitute beer and wine for the whiskey ration failed in the face of opposition from soldiers, and it remained in place until 1832.
But during the 1820s, various measures were taken to reduce intoxication in the army. They ranged from persuasion (temperance campaigners encouraged soldiers to take a pledge of abstinence), courts-martial, and even flogging. In some army forts, the whiskey ration was issued in two servings, half at breakfast and half at dinner, rather than all before breakfast, and soldiers were limited to buying a single gill each day from the merchants who followed the armies. Even so, there were continual reports of widespread drunkenness in the army, and alcohol was blamed for desertion, insubordination, disease, and death among soldiers. From a welter of proposals, a new policy emerged in 1832. The whiskey ration was replaced by coffee and tea, except for men on fatigue duty or in hospital (who continued to receive alcohol), and the sale of spirits to soldiers by civilians was prohibited. Reports on the effects of the new policy varied. Some said that discipline had improved, while others claimed that merchants were illicitly supplying soldiers with ever more liquor so that drunkenness was more widespread than before. Either way, the 1832 policy created the first officially dry army in the Western world.
Other military forces, such as the British, Russian, French, and German, continued to provide their soldiers with regular rations of alcohol, but their policies were not without their critics. There was a vigorous debate about the effects of alcohol on military efficiency (discussed in Chapter 12) as well as its implications for the health and physical fitness of soldiers and sailors. Some navies doled out daily rations of alcohol that were sometimes higher than those served to land-based troops because sailors had fewer opportunities to obtain additional alcohol. In the Royal Navy, the alcohol of choice was rum diluted by water, a mixture known as “grog.” From the mid-eighteenth century, the ration had been half a pint of rum mixed with a quart of water (one part rum to four parts water), which was doled out in two servings each day. This ration carried over to the American navy, although it was modified in 1794 to provide for either half a pint of whiskey or a quart of beer. The beer option was soon dropped (perhaps because of the volume needed onboard ship), and by 1805 the navy was going through 45,000 gallons of spirits a year. These volumes of alcohol might not, in themselves, have been problematic, but critics argued that they produced in sailors a craving for more and led to sailors’ smuggling alcohol onto their ships.21
Reports from various stations showed that relatively small percentages of sailors in the Royal Navy suffered from delirium tremens (a form of delirium, or “the shakes,” which is often associated with withdrawal from alcohol). There were 2,033 reported cases in the Royal Navy (of an aggregate strength of nearly three-quarters of a million) between 1858 and 1872, and of those, 112 died. The highest mortality rates came from naval stations in the West Indies, Bermuda, Canada, and South America, but even those translated into very low rates compared with the number of serving sailors. Moreover, mortality rates fell during 1858–88.22 One historian concluded, “It seems that in spite of their reputations as ‘drunken sailors,’ the seamen of that time displayed a low incidence of delirium tremens.”23
Policies reducing the alcohol available to American soldiers and sailors were born of their time, because restrictive policies were emerging in civilian society, too. The temperance movement got under way in the 1820s (this is discussed in more detail in Chapter 10) and seems to have had early successes. Some of the groups that were prominent in the temperance movement led by example: it is said that by 1840, 80 percent of the Protestant clergy and half the doctors in New York state had stopped drinking alcohol. If that were true (it is the sort of claim that cannot be verified), it was the leading edge of dramatic changes in alcohol consumption. By 1850, according to some reports, half the population living in small towns and the country had given up alcohol. And if that were true, it was not only a stunning turn of events, given that alcohol had been integral to American social life since the early 1600s, but it had no parallel anywhere else. What we do know is that the first state prohibition policy was enacted in Maine in 1851, and that is an indication of the strength of antialcohol ideas in the first half of the 1800s.
The apparently sudden and widespread embrace of abstinence raises the question of what Americans were drinking to hydrate themselves once they gave up alcohol. It is important to recognize that the United States had a drinking culture different from that of almost anywhere else, in that the dominant alcoholic beverages were distilled spirits: rum in the colonial period, whiskey in the early republic. Distilled spirits, even when diluted with water, do not have the same hydrating purpose or effects as beer or cider and even wine. Although spirits are mostly water, their high alcohol content means that drinking enough for hydration would quickly lead to intoxication. If the whiskey were sufficiently diluted with water, of course, it would (depending on the ratio of whiskey to water) have purified the water to some extent and been a more effectively hydrating beverage, although not very satisfying as an alcoholic beverage.
It is possible that rural America had sufficient supplies of clean drinking water to hydrate its population safely. Even though the claim that half the rural and small-town population of the United States had quickly abandoned alcohol seems unlikely to be true, the availability of safe, potable water would lead us to expect that they could have given up alcohol more readily than their city counterparts, who had no such alternative. Water in the cities was far more problematic, and urban workers (and others) must have been more reluctant to abstain from alcohol. There was, in addition, growing consumption of nonalcoholic beverages, such as coffee and tea, which provided safe hydration.
The effect of the antialcohol movements on nineteenth-century American drinking patterns is discussed in Chapter 10, but it is worth noting that at that time America experienced waves of immigration that might have been expected to push alcohol consumption up. Many Germans began to arrive in the 1820s, and they brought their beer-drinking culture with them. Three decades later, a wave of beer- and whiskey-drinking Irish immigrants arrived, fleeing the famine in their homeland. Yet although alcohol consumption rates in contemporary Germany and Ireland were undoubtedly higher than in the United States, and the immigrants might well have consumed more than the resident population, their numbers were nowhere near big enough to affect the overall level of American alcohol consumption. The effect of these two groups on America’s drinking culture was felt in other ways. From the 1850s, German immigrants began to open the breweries that became some of the biggest in the United States, Coors, Miller, Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz among them. For their part, Irish immigrants contributed to American culture Irish-themed saloons and St. Patrick’s Day, an alcohol-centered festivity for Irish and non-Irish alike.
As the examples of Britain, France, and the United States show, alcohol was widely consumed in the nineteenth century, but critics focused mainly on urban drinking and on the working class. It was true even more broadly. In Germany, industrialization took off in the 1850s and 1860s, and by the mid-1870s, one in six workers was employed in industry. As real wages improved in the early period of industrial growth, alcohol consumption rose: between 1855 and 1873, consumption of Schnapps (which referred to any distilled spirits) increased by 50 percent and sales of beer nearly doubled, increases that far outstripped population growth. Per capita consumption reached its peak in the early 1870s, when each adult consumed an average 10.2 liters of pure alcohol, equally represented by beer and spirits. But at that point the German economy entered an industrial depression, and brandy was largely priced out of workers’ budgets. Although beer sales rose steadily through the early 1900s, spirits declined steeply, lowering the per capita volume of pure alcohol consumed.24
Alcohol regularly punctuated the workday in mid-century Germany. Employers provided alcohol to their workers until they realized that it had a harmful effect on labor discipline and productivity. Even though per capita consumption was not high in relative terms, the steady intake of alcohol, combined with the novelty of urban industrial life, stirred anxiety in middle-class observers. It was not that workers were perceived as drunken and debauched—the sort of allegations made in England—but that their drinking made them “lazy, unreliable, disruptive and dissatisfied,” as one temperance leader put it.25 By 1885, two-thirds of factories in one survey had banned the use of spirits on their premises, but half of them reported problems of resistance by workers who smuggled alcohol in.26
The nineteenth-century social lens was firmly focused on the new urban working class, the unprecedented, growing, and often threatening social class of the industrial economy everywhere. Alcohol was consumed in small towns, villages, and isolated farms, too, but it was far less visible. Drinking establishments in small communities and the country were thought of as places where agricultural workers socialized. Small-town and rural social pressure and convention might well have ensured that they remained reasonably orderly. The cities, on the other hand, produced a profusion of drinking places, and whether they were French cabarets, British beer-houses, German beer-cellars, or American saloons, they were portrayed as places of immorality and criminality. Urban society did not regulate itself the way country society did, and nor was there, in the 1800s, a police force big enough to reassure the middle and upper classes. By the nineteenth century, any notion of people of vastly different social class rubbing elbows at the bar (if it was ever generally true) disappeared as the upper and middle classes retreated to their homes and private clubs in the face of growing crowds of unruly workers. If alcohol in itself were considered problematic, alcohol in the hands of urban workers was regarded as an imminent threat to the social and moral order.
And the number of large industrial cities grew. In Europe in 1800 there were twenty-two cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. By 1900, there were seventy-nine, and they were only the largest of many more large concentrations of population. Cities meant not only more people crammed together but also problems of social order and health. The upper and middle classes deplored the behavior of what they thought of as the “dangerous classes”—the workers and the poor—whose living arrangements, relationships, hygiene, and social comportment left so much to be desired. As one French commentator put it, “Savages alone take to drink with the fervor displayed by the most degraded part of the poor classes, like the Negro on the African coast, who sells his children and himself for a bottle of spirits. . . . To the savage, intoxication is supreme felicity; to the destitute of the great cities it is an invincible passion, an indulgence which they cannot do without.”27
What was the cure for the many ills of the city? Water. Safe, clean drinking water.
Water is necessary for human life, but in the cities of the nineteenth century, it was often polluted, especially by their inhabitants who disposed of human and industrial waste in ways that made rivers and other bodies of water unsuitable for drinking. The pollution of water supplies began long before the nineteenth century, but it reached a critical point then. Historian Peter Mathias describes the early 1800s as “an age when drinking water was the most dangerous habit of all.”28 In the mid-1800s, water from the River Thames taken onboard Royal Navy ships in London for consumption by sailors on long voyages was described this way: “It purifies itself, say the apologists; and so to a certain extent it does: but the process of purification is far from rapid, during which it exhibits various forms of putridity, and a variety of colours, as the runnings from gas-works or sewers may predominate in each particular cask.”29
London was far from unique in having water problems. An 1830s report on Boston, Massachusetts, noted that a quarter of the wells that provided the city’s water were bad, and the rest left much to be desired. “There are many persons upon whom the well water of Boston acts very unpleasantly, making them sick at the stomach. . . . In most persons it produces constipation of the bowels and many other . . . symptoms of diseased functions. It is much desired that good water should be supplied to the city so as to reach every dwelling and supply every person.”30 That was a need in many places. Inhabitants of the poorer districts of Leeds, in northern England, had no water within a quarter of a mile of their dwellings, and very few even had vessels in which they could fetch water.31 The drinking water of Brussels, in Belgium, was described in the 1830s and 1840s as having a “disgusting flavour,” a “foul odor,” an “extremely disagreeable smell of rotten wood,” and a “nauseating taste.” An 1844 study of Paris concluded that barely 10 percent of the water drawn from the public fountains was drinkable.32
From the mid-1800s, central and urban governments began to address the water problem by constructing systems that piped clean water to cities. They were driven by several considerations. First, there were waves of epidemics of waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever between the 1830s and 1850s. An outbreak of cholera in the Soho district of London in 1854 killed more than 500 people in ten days.33 Second, the ruling classes believed that the urban masses needed the means to keep themselves and their environments clean and hygienic, and that meant providing water suitable for washing as well as sewage systems to carry waste away. Third, the simple existence of water was sometimes construed as having the power to improve morality. Urban planners in Boston and elsewhere included fountains in their designs on the ground that the sight and sound of water had the power to tame urban passions and bring order and decency to the disorder and degradation of the city. Fourth, safe drinking water would be an alternative to the alcohol that was increasingly blamed for social and moral disorder. Water, then, would cleanse the city and the bodies of its teeming inhabitants of many of their physical and moral maladies. And as the Reverend John Garwood of the London City Mission observed in 1859, water would fix the drinking problem: “A very large amount of drunkenness is occasioned by the great difficulty of obtaining pure water to drink in many of the poor parts of London.”34
By the time Garwood made that observation, dozens of municipalities in England, Scotland, and Wales had begun to create systems for piping filtered water to cities, sometimes to public fountains, sometimes to individual dwellings. These major public works, which involved establishing reservoirs of water together with piping systems, took decades to complete, but gradually during the 1800s many urban populations were supplied with water that was suitable for drinking, food preparation, and washing. From the 1840s through the end of the century, some 180 British towns and cities established clean water supplies, and by 1911, 96 percent of dwellings in London were connected to a water supply. This was a much higher percentage than in Paris, where most water was piped to public outlets rather than to individual dwellings.35 In the Netherlands, piped water was introduced to Amsterdam first, in 1854, before being extended to Rotterdam and The Hague in the 1860s and to Leiden, Utrecht, and Arnhem in the 1870s and 1880s. By the end of the century, about 40 percent of the Dutch population had access to piped drinking water.36
The technologies developed in Europe were soon applied around the world. An English engineer oversaw the waterworks that was completed in Yokohama in 1887, and in the following years he consulted on water supplies for other Japanese cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe. Other Europeans were actively involved in projects to supply drinking water in Asian cities that included Mumbai, Hong Kong, Colombo, Karachi, and Singapore.37 They were undertaken in the spirit of colonial interest. Henry Conybeare, an English engineer heavily involved in water reform, wrote that fresh water would reduce illness caused by bad water: “For every death . . . there are . . . at least fourteen cases of illness . . . during which the patient is not only unproductive himself, but is a burden on the productive labour of others.”38
In the United States, providing fresh water had moved ahead more rapidly. New York had tried various methods, but by the 1830s the volume and quality of the city’s water was reaching a critical stage. An 1830 report by the Lyceum of Natural History, New York’s leading scientific body, concluded that the city was simply unable to provide an “adequate supply of good or wholesome water” from its own rivers and wells. The underlying geological structure of New York was not suitable for wells, and even though urine that seeped into wells from cisterns softened the hard well water, the Lyceum’s scientists noted that “the fastidious may revolt from the use of water thus sweetened to our palate.”39 The quality of the water might have been argument enough in favor of a new water supply system, but temperance campaigners argued for it as an alternative to alcohol. Ironically, they found themselves on the same side as the city’s brewers, who argued that New Yorkers were turning to beer made in Philadelphia because of the unpleasant taint local water gave to the local beers. The alcohol industry was not an insignificant lobby. In 1835, when New York contained 30,000 houses, there were 2,646 taverns (1 tavern for 12 houses), 63 distilleries, and 12 breweries within the city limits.
But as elsewhere, it was partly an outbreak of disease—in this case, cholera, which killed thousands in 1832—that spurred New York’s administrators into action. Three years later, a disastrous fire that could not be doused because of inadequate water supplies reinforced the sense of urgency. Even so, not until 1842 was an aqueduct, which brought water from a river thirty miles from Manhattan, completed. The water was judged “a wholesome temperance beverage,” and the celebrations and procession held to mark the arrival of fresh, clean water had a clear antialcohol tone: “The temperance societies . . . won high marks for their display of a water hydrant chasing a rum cask and a banner with an inverted decanter reading ‘Right Side Up.’”40
In Boston the first municipal water system was completed in 1848 after years of debate among reformers and ordinary citizens.41 Providing water as an alternative to alcohol was only one of the issues in play; clean, fresh, potable, and free water was seen as a resource that citizens had a right to, and it was portrayed as beneficial to health, morality, and social order. There was little doubt that Boston’s water supply was overtaxed and of poor quality. An 1834 survey showed that consumers considered that 30 of the city’s nearly 3,000 wells delivered undrinkable water. Water from many of the rest tasted bad, and some was so discolored that it stained clothing washed in it.
The wish to reduce alcohol consumption was only one part of the campaign to provide Bostonians with good drinking water, but it was a prominent argument. Some held that people added alcohol to poor quality water to make it drinkable; one artisan said “he used to mix spirit with water, when it was so bad I could not drink it without.” There was also the evidence of a citizen of Philadelphia, which already had a waterworks: “I was in the daily habit of using intoxicating drinks, and scarce ever drank water without mixing them with it. Since the introduction of that [fresh] water, I have almost abandoned the use of such drinks . . . I do not want them.” Little wonder that supporters of temperance fell in behind the water movement. They praised water as the pure beverage that was part of nature and compared it to human-made, fabricated, alcoholic beverages. As part of nature, water was God-given, as one writer pointed out graphically: “Not in the simmering still, over smoky fires, choked with poisonous gases and surrounded with the stench of sickening odors and rank corruptions, doth our Father in heaven prepare the precious essence of life—the pure cold water.”42
Many more examples could be given to illustrate this trend. Throughout Europe and North America (and elsewhere) during the nineteenth century, more and more urban populations had reliable access to the clean, fresh drinking water that moral reformers hoped would replace alcohol. Americans began to use far more water for a wide variety of purposes (including washing and drinking) than Europeans. By the beginning of the twentieth century, people in Europe’s largest cities (including London, Paris, and Berlin) went through 86 liters of water per capita each day. In the major cities of the United States, the figure was 341 liters, four times the volume on a per capita basis.43 The situation in smaller towns and rural areas is less clear, and it is likely that many continued to rely on the water of variable quality that came from local springs and rivers and from artesian wells.
In some places, such as Boston, the antialcohol and pro-water lobbies joined forces to argue explicitly not only that improved water supplies were desirable in themselves but that they would also benefit society by hastening the arrival of an alcohol-free society. Even so, the temperance argument for water reform was not without its opponents. One pamphleteer condemned the “impudence” of Boston’s water campaigners in hitching their wagon to the temperance cause and “prating about pure and soft water, while every syllable they utter is accompanied by the compound stench of brandy and tobacco.” He doubted whether water would ever be an adequate substitute for brandy: “How little influence has the quality of water, upon the brandy-drinker’s habits! He may assign it as an excuse, and when the city shall have removed this excuse, at the cost of millions, he will readily find another.”44
He was probably right that few alcohol-drinkers were likely to be swayed, or quickly swayed, toward abstinence simply because clean drinking water was—literally—on tap. Later in the century, in 1870, the British Medical Journal lamented that “the social movement in favour of water-drinking has been steadily pushed on for nearly forty years,” but that no matter where you looked—hospitals, prisons, or the “poorer streets of any British town on Saturday night”—there was clear evidence that “prominent amongst the causes of human misery, in all its legion forms, is DRINK.”45
Yet the provision of drinking water in major cities had important consequences for the history of alcohol. In many parts of the world, especially in the industrial cities where alcohol abuse was believed to be especially serious, it could no longer be argued that alcohol was necessary for hydration. As such, alcohol could be viewed as an almost exclusively recreational drink, a discretionary beverage that could be given up without any harmful consequences. Indeed, the centuries-old argument for the superiority of alcohol over water could be and was turned on its head: beginning in the nineteenth century, water would be portrayed as the safe choice, and alcohol could be condemned as harmful. But whereas water had been seen as dangerous to the health of individuals, alcohol could be represented as harmful to society and morality as well. The provision of supplies of safe drinking water was thus one of the conditions that made possible a real shift in attitudes toward alcohol and provided a basis for the rise of temperance ideologies in the 1800s.