- Rorabaugh, W. J.
The Alcoholic Republic.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
ISBN 978-0-19-502990-1.
-
This book was
recommended
to me
by Prof. Paul Rahe after I
had commented
during a discussion on
Ricochet
about drug (and other forms of) prohibition, using the commonplace libertarian
argument that regardless of what one believes about the principle
of self-ownership and the dangers to society if its members ingest certain
substances, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, the evidence is that
prohibition of anything simply makes the problem worse—in many cases
not only increasing profits to traffickers in the banned substance,
spawning crime among those who contend to provide it to those who
seek it in the absence of an open market, promoting contempt for the law
(the president of the United States, as of this writing, admitted in his
autobiography to have used a substance whose possession, had he been
apprehended, was a felony), and most of all that post-prohibition, use of
the forbidden substance increases, and hence however satisfying prohibition
may be to those who support, enact, and enforce it, it is ultimately
counterproductive, as it increases the number of people who taste the
forbidden fruit.
I read every book my readers
recommend,
albeit not immediately, and so I put this book on my queue, and have now
digested it. This is a fascinating view of a very different America: a
newly independent nation in the first two decades of the nineteenth century,
still mostly a coastal nation with a vast wilderness to the West, but beginning
to expand over the mountains into the fertile land beyond. The one thing
all European visitors to America remarked upon was that people in this
brave new republic, from strait-laced New Englanders, to Virginia patricians, to
plantation barons of the South, to buckskin pioneers and homesteaders across
the Appalachians, drank a lot, reaching a peak around 1830 of
five gallons (19 litres) of hard spirits (in excess of 45%
alcohol) per capita per annum—and that “per capita”
includes children and babies in a rapidly growing population, so the
adults, and particularly the men, disproportionately contributed to this
aggregate.
As the author teases out of the sketchy data of the period, there were a
number of social, cultural, and economic reasons for this. Prior to the
revolution, America was a rum drinking nation, but after the break with
Britain whiskey made from maize (corn, in the American vernacular) became
the beverage of choice. As Americans migrated and settled the West,
maize was their crop of choice, but before the era of canals and
railroads, shipping their crop to the markets of the East cost
more than its value. Distilling into a much-sought beverage, however,
made the arduous trek to market profitable, and justified the round
trip. In the rugged western frontier, drinking water was not to be
trusted, and a sip of contaminated water could condemn one to a
debilitating and possibly fatal bout of dysentery or cholera. None of
these bugs could survive in whiskey, and hence it was seen as the
healthy beverage. Finally, whiskey provides 83 calories per
fluid ounce, and is thus a compact way to store and transmit food
value without need for refrigeration.
Some things never change. European visitors to America remarked upon the
phenomenon of “rapid eating” or, as we now call it,
“fast food”. With the fare at most taverns outside the
cities limited to fried corn cakes, salt pork, and whiskey, there was
precious little need to linger over one's meal, and hence it was
in-and-out, centuries before
the burger.
But then, things change. Starting around 1830, alcohol
consumption in the United States began to plummet, and temperance
societies began to spring up across the land. From a peak of
about 5 gallons per capita, distilled spirits consumption fell to
between 1 and 2 gallons and has remained more or less constant ever since.
But what is interesting is that the widespread turn away from hard liquor
was not in any way produced by top-down or coercive prohibition. Instead,
it was a bottom-up social movement largely coupled with the
second great
awakening. While this movement certainly did result in
some forms of restrictions on the production and sale of alcohol,
much more effective were its opprobrium against public drunkenness and those
who enabled it.
This book is based on a Ph.D. thesis, and in places shows it. There is a painful
attempt, based on laughably incomplete data, to quantify alcohol consumption
during the early 19th century. This, I assume, is because at the epoch
“social scientists” repeated the mantra “numbers are
good”. This is all nonsense; ignore it. Far more credible are the
reports of contemporary observers quoted in the text.
As to Prof. Rahe's assertion that prohibition reduces the consumption of a
substance, I don't think this book advances that case. The collapse in
the consumption of strong drink in the 1830s was a societal and moral
revolution, and any restrictions on the availability of alcohol were the
result of that change, not its cause. That said, I do not dispute that
prohibition
did reduce the reported level of alcohol consumption, but at the cost
of horrific criminality and disdain for the rule of law and, after
repeal, a return to the status quo ante.
If you're interested in prohibition in all of its manifestations, I
recommend this book, even though it has little to do with prohibition.
It is an object lesson in how a free society self-corrects from excess
and re-orients itself toward behaviour which benefits its citizens.
November 2012 