It makes you wonder: what would life be like without alcohol? Once or twice I’ve stopped drinking for a few months for different reasons – medication, general self-disgust – and found that I sleep better, lose weight, and save money. But when I'm face to face with the golden glow of a frosty draft or the velvety, seductive tones of a glass of red wine, I always give up trying to give up alcohol.
If it’s hard to imagine giving up drinking for a month or two, it’s even more difficult to fathom that there was once a time in American history where the government tried to make everyone give up drinking. Forever! These were the days of the Anti-Saloon League and Prohibition. Given all of the recent arm-wrestling over health care in this country, can you believe that the government once worked together long enough – it took almost a year to get the required votes – to pass a constitutional amendment banning the “manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors”? You really have to care about public health to get that one passed.
Unfortunately, the idea proved to be so terrible, or at the very least impractical, that it became the first amendment of the constitution to be wiped off the books when it was repealed by the 21st amendment, aka the That Wasn’t Such a Great Idea After All Amendment.
As I watched thousands of Ohioans get drunk on Saturday, I wondered whether they knew of Ohio’s deep roots in the nation’s effort to ban alcohol at the turn of the century. The national Anti-Saloon League had grown from the efforts and organizational strategies of Anti-Salooners in Ohio, more specifically of Howard H. Russell, a lawyer and divinity student in Oberlin in the 1880’s. Russell and others had concerns about the emerging influence of brewers nationwide who had figured out how to produce, transport, and refrigerate their product in large quantities. Middle-class workers began to drink the cheap, readily available grog during their lunch hours, sometimes having the beer delivered in pails by local school-children.
One thing that Ohio taught other states leading the charge to prohibition was the value of holding ‘local-option’ elections which enabled voters to decide, on a town-by-town level, whether the town should be wet or dry. This grassroots campaign to rid the nation of sweet, sweet beer was driven in part by the efforts, publications, and propaganda of the American Issue Publishing Company based right here in Westerville. Eventually American Issue became the most widely circulated publisher of temperance literature, with over 300,000 copies of its journal published in 1907.
The literature printed and distributed from Westerville included newspapers, fliers, magazines, and cartoons promoting the voice of the temperance movement and highlighting all of the wretches of drinking. One section of American Issue published fictional, cautionary tales for young people tempted to drink. The best one I read was called “Pasture Gossip,” about two horses named Gypsy and Barney hanging out in the pasture swapping stories about the local drunks and the saloon keepers conspiring to keep them drunk. In the end, they conclude that it’s much better to be a horse, where at least your mind is safe from the poisonous ale plaguing the townspeople.
American Issue also composed songs to be sung at prohibition rallies throughout Ohio and the rest of the country. The chorus of one song called “The World Is Going Dry” goes like this:
We’ll work for prohibition
Wherever men are found;
We’ll fight the liquor traffic
In earth’s remotest bound;
Come join the mighty army,
Help raise the battle cry!
Rally now with us,
Be up and ready,
We’ll make the whole world dry!
As a means to stir up support for a cause, this song was not all that different from the one I heard sung by 100,000 people Saturday night at Ohio Stadium, where the world was not going dry:
And when we win the game,
We’ll buy a keg of booze,
And we’ll drink to old O-hi-o
Till we wobble in our shoes!
The origin of this song dates back to, you guessed it, the early 1900’s around the time that the brewers were gaining strength and the teetotalers began to fight back with songs of their own. When the eighteenth amendment was ratified in 1919 banning the production and sale of alcohol, the words of the Ohio State song – which was actually a patchwork of other songs from other schools, including Michigan of all places – were changed to:
And when we win the game,
I’ll tell you what we’ll do
We will yell for old O-hi-o
Till we wobble in our shoes!
On Saturday night in 2009, exactly one hundred years after American Issue was wallpapering the state of Ohio with anti-alcohol admonitions, Buckeye nation confirmed that the warnings have fallen on deaf ears as 100,000 Ohioans drank, yelled, and, when the game was over, wobbled their way out of the ‘Shoe.
No comments:
Post a Comment