Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (42 page)

America had always been suspicious of the town. ‘Those who labour in the earth,’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, ‘are the chosen people of God.’
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The Constitution had avoided a metropolitan capital. State assemblies would meet not in the big towns, but in rural centres like Albany. America was to be a land of godly farmers governed by wise and independent country gentlemen.

By the end of the nineteenth century it had all gone wrong. The Civil War had been followed by rapid industrialisation and economic growth. Immigrants had flooded in. By the turn of the century, America was no longer a land of villages. It was no longer a land of whites, or Protestants, or even of Anglo-Saxons. In the cities, migrants huddled in anonymous slum dwellings. And the cities themselves were changed beyond recognition. New grids of streets cut across farmland; unimaginable new buildings rose up into the sky. New York and Chicago became places of transformation. Vast fortunes were made by men who had never held a plough. The Jazz Age celebrated modernity and high spending. It was a time of neurotic hedonism. Nightclubs and cinemas gave New Yorkers the same risky pleasures that Londoners had once found in the theatre and masquerade. Silent movies lingered endlessly on the lives of the decadent rich: their silks, their cocktails, their extravagance.

‘It was borrowed time anyhow,’ wrote F Scott Fitzgerald of the age he characterised, ‘the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.’
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Walter Lippmann, surveying Prohibition in 1927, saw exactly what it all meant to conservatives. ‘The evil which the old-fashioned preachers ascribe to the Pope, to Babylon, to atheists, and to the devil,’ he wrote, ‘is simply the new urban civilisation, with its
irresistible scientific and economic and mass power. The Pope, the devil, jazz, the bootleggers, are a mythology which expresses symbolically the impact of a vast and dreaded social change.’
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Alcohol was the conservatives’ scapegoat. Just as gin had in the 1720s, it became a focus for all the evils of the age. Drink threatened America’s security and damaged its economy. ‘King Alcohol,’ fumed the
National Temperance Almanac
in 1876, ‘has … filled our prisons, our alms-houses and lunatic asylums, and erected the gibbet before our eyes. He has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of our citizens annually … He has turned … hundreds of thousands … to idleness and vice, infused into them the spirit of demons, and degraded them below the level of brutes. He has made thousand of widows and orphans … He has introduced among us hereditary diseases, both physical and mental, thereby tending to deteriorate the human race.’
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If booze was responsible for all the evils of the age, then Prohibition, as in 1736, became the panacea. That was the reformers’ message; its eventual triumph was achieved through Christian fervour allied to impressive powers of organisation. In 1736 it was Thomas Wilson who navigated the bandwagon towards prohibition. Two centuries later it was Wayne B Wheeler, working behind the scenes, who organised the propaganda and made the connections.
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The drinks companies in America were powerful, just as the London malt distillers were powerful, but the reformers outmanoeuvred them at every turn. On 16 January 1920, the Volstead Act came into force, and America turned dry.

The authorities had been expecting trouble on the night Prohibition came in, but in the end it was a damp squib. There were mock-funerals for John Barleycorn at Maxim’s and the Golden Glades. The Hotel Vanderbilt gave away free whisky. At Reisenweber’s, ladies were handed compacts in the shape of coffins. The protests, though, were only symbolic. ‘The big farewell,’ as the
New York Evening Post
put it, ‘failed to materialise.’ Maybe the authorities assumed $1,000 fines and six-month jail sentences would be enough to deter anybody. The truth was rather different. There were no riots because there would be no Prohibition. In the great towns and cities, the Volstead Act was a dead letter from the start.

Reformers had feared crime and a subversive population. Prohibition gave them both. By criminalising one of America’s biggest industries, they handed it over to bootleggers like George Remus and Lucky Luciano. In Chicago, news reports were soon full of the feud between Big Jim Colosimo and Johnny Torrio. Al Capone was waiting in the wings.

Worst of all, Prohibition – just as it had in 1736 – turned ordinary citizens into criminals themselves. Men and women who paid taxes and went to church found themselves law-breakers just by pouring a glass of beer. Prohibition drove a wedge into society. For many, it was a straightforward split between rich and poor. The Yale Club had bought up fourteen years’ supply of booze before the Volstead Act came into force. As a result, ‘the workers,’ as one Union leader put it, ‘who have no cellars … learn to hate their more fortunate fellow citizens more bitterly and uncompromisingly.’
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‘Very few [working men],’ the Wickersham Commission reported towards the end of Prohibition, ‘have any respect for the Prohibition laws and do not hesitate to say so. They consider these laws discriminatory … and therefore have no compunction in violating them.’

Alienation fuelled a cult of subversion. Some had seen it coming. ‘This law will be almost impossible of enforcement,’ Fiorello La Guardia, future mayor of New York, wrote to Andrew Volstead even while his Act was passing through Congress. ‘And if this law fails to be enforced … it will create contempt and disregard for the law all over the country.’
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Criminals became elevated, as Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin had been, into popular heroes. The speakeasy and nightclub started to develop their own counter-culture. Eighteenth-century Londoners had drunk Blue Ruin, Bob Makeshift and South Sea Mountain. In their turn, Americans in the Roaring Twenties rolled under the table in the clutches of Old Horsey, Happy Sally, Soda Pop Moon, or Jersey Lightning.

Some of them didn’t get up again. Eighteenth-century gin had been a deadly concoction of poisons, flavourings and malt spirit. The ‘bathtub gin’ produced under Prohibition was no better. Industrial alcohol was poisoned by law to make it unpalatable. Bootleggers added glycerine and oil of juniper to make gin, caramel and creosote to make whisky. When New York authorities tested seizures in 1928, they found that nearly all the booze they tried still contained poisons. Some reckoned 50,000 Americans were killed, blinded or paralysed during Prohibition.

Even so, Prohibition never stopped people drinking. But to the American authorities, just as to Robert Walpole and Thomas De Veil, that was soon no longer the point. ‘The issue is fast coming to be recognised,’ President Harding would proclaim, ‘not as a contention between those who want to drink and those who do not … but as one involving the great question whether the laws of this country can and will be enforced.’
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By the mid-Twenties, Prohibition was no longer about drink; it was about government authority. Faced with widespread disregard of
the law, the authorities determined to force it through. Brigadier General Lincoln Andrews was appointed Prohibition ‘Czar’ on April Fool’s Day 1925. Draconian punishments were made still harsher.

The only effect of the clamp-down, as in 1738, was to fill up the prisons. By 1929, federal convictions for liquor offences had doubled, and the government had started work on six new jails. Out at sea, meanwhile, as in the early eighteenth century, Prohibition had created an uncontrollable problem of smuggling, as schooners and speedboats queued up along the coast to deliver their illicit cargo. And the manner of the clamp-down only alienated even more of the population. ‘As a class,’ wrote Stanley Walker, city editor of the
New York Times
, ‘[prohibition agents] made themselves offensive beyond words, and their multifarious doings made them the pariahs of New York.’
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Ninety-two would be killed in the course of Prohibition.
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Agents’ $40-a-week pay made them as susceptible to corruption as Edward Parker had been two centuries earlier. The bootlegger George Remus claimed he only ever found two people who turned down a bribe. Magistrates of the 1730s had complained of constables who were gin-sellers themselves. In 1926, Mayor William E. Dever of Chicago told Congress that sixty per cent of his police force were in the liquor business.
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Prohibition had failed. The reformers’ attempt to outlaw it had succeeded only in worsening the problem; along the way they had managed to undermine the contract between the American government and the society they governed. And for politicians, there were still worse problems to wrestle with. For as long as booze was being sold under the counter, they made no money from it. And by 1932, politicians needed all the revenue they could get. The Wall Street Crash had brought a frenzy of speculative growth to a close. The costs of the New Deal lay ahead.

The cold winds of Depression had their effect in other ways
as well. In the 1750s, falling standards of living had played their part in reducing gin-drinking. For out-of-work Americans in 1930, there was no longer money to spend at the bar. An Age of Risk – of transformation and change, opportunity and calamity – had come to an end. A time of vanishing social hierarchies and increasing individualism was replaced by one which offered new visions of social responsibility (a vision which would be reinforced a decade later, when the Second World War created a role for America as global superpower).

And so America made its pact with the devil. The politicians had their drink revenues; reformers comforted themselves with the end of the crime wave; and for companies like Seagram’s (founded by Samuel Bronfman, who had once been Canada’s biggest bootlegger), the profits began to pile up. John Barleycorn was allowed to stay in America.

On 21 December 1970, President Richard Nixon met Elvis Presley in the Oval Office. They didn’t talk about rock’n’roll; they talked about drugs. Both President and King were worried about what was happening to young people in America. Elvis wanted to help. He wondered if he could be become an honorary agent at large to help fight drugs. Nixon wanted all the support he could get. The corruptions and cover-ups of the Watergate affair were still two years away. In 1970, narcotics, and what was wrong with American young people, were foremost on the President’s mind. The war on drugs was about to be declared.

During the 1960s, a whole pharmacopia of drugs had suddenly appeared on the streets of western cities. Heroin and cannabis had a long history in some parts of the world, but had never been used in the west on any large scale; alongside them emerged new synthetic chemicals like LSD. The novelty of drugs was a large part of their threat. Alcohol was hallowed by time and custom. Every western
culture had embedded drink in a web of traditions and habits, in traditional drinking places like the English pub or German wine cellar. Narcotics were different. They were taken in new ways, by new people. Their effects seemed different and terrible.

They weren’t the only thing about the 1960s that was new. Drugs burst on the world in a decade of unsettling social and economic change. Old manners and customs were swept away. The Old World’s foundations were rocked by a sexual revolution, a revolution in classes and generations, a revolution of manners. Suddenly, cities like New York, London and San Francisco seemed to offer unprecedented possibilities. People no longer needed to follow a single path from factory to grave. They could transform their clothes, their accent, their music. They could transform themselves. And waves of speculation over the next four decades provided new ways for people to become rich – from media moguls to Wall Street traders, Loadsamoney to dotcom millionaires – and poor again.

There were endless new ways to spend money as well. Social change whipped up a fashion firestorm. The consumer society was (re-)born. A 1950s salary might have gone into a nest-egg for a rainy day. Now it would disappear in new clothes, household goods, music, and the exploding business of leisure. With the arrival of television, there was a huge and brash new medium to broadcast the changes of the new age. Not even the retired colonel living down a leafy lane in Kent could escape what was happening on Carnaby Street. Advertising reached everyone, everywhere.

But it didn’t mean that everyone had to like it. The changes of the 1960s brought unprecedented opportunities, but also frightening uncertainties. It was a new Age of Risk, febrile and exhilarating, narcissistic and neurotic. Beyond the bright lights, the sports cars to covet and the celebrities to emulate, beyond the freedoms of air travel or contraceptive pill, the new age seethed with old spectres. Crime soared, and so did the fear of crime. Families broke down; old
communities were eroded; violence filled cinema screens. Squalid urban slums mushroomed behind the advertising hoardings.

Drugs were soon singled out as a focus for society’s fears about its own transformation. As in the early eighteenth century, Drug Craze and Drug Panic were joined at the neck. The problems were familiar, and so were the fears. Drugs produced crime. It wasn’t just heroin addicts committing robbery to pay for their addiction; the drug-user was uncontrolled, more likely to attack strangers, a menace. Drugs broke down families. A whole generation was growing up unable to fulfil their useful role in the economy. Soon there would be fears that NATO security was at risk because American servicemen were debilitated by drugs. Prisons were said to be overrun with heroin. New spectres began to stalk the nightmares of city-dwellers. The crack addict wove along the pavement contemplating attacks on strangers; in the basement crack den, addicts lay stupefied in half-darkness; ‘crack babies’ were born to addict mothers who abused social security to fund their habit. Judith Defour was back on the streets.