﻿The average American drinks about 2.3 gallons (about 8.7 liters) in pure alcohol each year.
Keep in mind that’s pure alcohol - not the water in your wine or beer or liquor - just
the pure alcohol in those drinks. Ok. Now, flashback 200 plus years - the
earliest years of the American Republic. People drank so much back then: a drink when
waking, a drink at the 11am work break, a drink with lunch (every meal for that matter),
and nightcap before bed. Even children drank. W.J. Rorabaugh described mom and dad giving
toddlers the quote “heavily sugared portion at the bottom of a parent’s mug of rum toddy.” (4) I’m
blown away by this anecdote Rorbaugh found for his book, “The Alcoholic Republic”: a traveler
noted quote “I have frequently seen fathers wake their child of a year old from a sound
sleep to make it drink rum or brandy.” (5,14) I encountered an anecdote in a couple secondary
sources that sums this up fairly well. Frederick Marryat wrote: “I am sure the Americans can fix
nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make
acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they
make it up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successful
in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early
in the morning, they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it,
until they soon drop into the grave.” (6&7) Each year, that drinking added up to around 5.8
gallons (22 liters) of pure alcohol per person (2). That 5.8 gallons in 1790 was higher than
twenty years earlier in 1770, when consumption was 3.5 gallons (16 liters). Which is still a
lot! Not too long later, during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson in 1830, that number went to the
highest it would ever go: 7.1 gallons (about 28 liters) of pure alcohol per American per year on
average (2). The average laborer was estimated to drink at least 4 ounces of spirits each
day. Coincidentally, after Andrew Jackson’s Inauguration, there was a massive party that
overran the White House. It got so rowdy Jackson had to flee well-wishers out a window.
The American founders were regular drinkers too - the Mayflower had a bunch of beer on
it (6). George Washington even had a Whiskey distillery. Despite their own regular drinking,
the first three presidents were nonetheless concerned at increasing rates of overconsumption
in the new country. Were the trend to continue, the country would devolve to drunkards.
What were people drinking? Mostly whiskey, rum, gin, and brandy,
but those were often accompanied with beer, wine and cider (5). Prior to the American Revolution,
rum from the West Indies was common. Nearby British colonies supplied thirsty American
colonists to their heart’s content. But when the war broke out, the British blockaded,
and people were forced to ask, “Why is the rum gone?”. Cut off by the British barman, Scottish
and Irish immigrants came to the rescue (4). Queue the long American obsession with Whiskey.
Where were people drinking? In taverns and at parties and in courtrooms and other public places,
yes. But most alcohol was consumed in the home. That was particularly true for women, for whom
drinking needed to be paired with holding up society’s expectations of behavior. This was also
to be carefully considered by enslaved people, for whom laws limited and sometimes downright
banned their consumption of alcohol. When did Americans drink? All the time: morning,
noon and night - for ordinary days and especially for holidays. They drank before work to open their
eyes, at a lunch break to keep up spirits, in the afternoon to close a business deal,
and in the evening before bed to close those same tired eyes once again. At election time,
political candidates handed out free drinks. To resist passing out bottles of liquor to
the masses at your events was to risk defeat at the polls. So yeah, drinking all the time.
After the US achieved independence, settlers in Kentucky and Ohio made whiskey with burgeoning
quantities of corn, and their surpluses of rye, wheat and barley, when available. The surplus
meant that even with federal taxation, whiskey was cheap - cheaper than other drinks, like coffee or
tea, or other forms of alcohol (4). That doesn’t mean farmers were pleased with the taxation
of whiskey, see 1791’s Whiskey Rebellion, but nonetheless, whiskey production and consumption
grew in the first years of the independent United States, and blew past rum in huge chunks.
Whiskey wasn’t just cheaper than water and tea, it was safer. At least in the short-term,
it was better for your health. Water supplies were often contaminated in cities, or murky
with sediment in rural areas. Private wells were often not tapped for public consumption,
and springs too distant to justify the arduous journey. People were straight-up
scared of water. Drinking it involved personal and societal friction; alcohol did not.
What about milk? Interest in the safety of cow’s milk has always been high,
as many mothers have chosen not to breastfeed over the centuries. For a time, bacteria’s
role in making milk unsafe wasn’t completely known, and many children died because of that
ignorance. Pasteurization, the process by which milk is exposed to low heat to kill pathogens,
became required in major American cities at the turn of the 20th century. The prioritization
of making milk safer even landed on the desk of then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who is
quoted in Mark Kurlansky’s excellent book on milk history as saying, “Upon this [milk] industry,
more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health,
but there depend upon it the very growth and virility of the white race.” Dang - maybe Herbert
Hoover was drinking liquor in order to talk about milk. In any event, one hundred years earlier,
where our focus is, milk was just another dicey thing to drink; even if it were of quality,
a large number of people were lactose intolerant. So, just give yourself
and your baby whiskey. Problem solved. Next question: who was doing the drinking? Well,
Americans. I’ve already given you the averages. But it’s unlikely that the drinking was spread
evenly across the population, and thus, the average amounts can be a bit misleading. For
example, near America’s alcoholic peak, in 1820, again according to W.J. Rorabaugh,
quote “half the adult males - one-eight of the total population - were drinking two-thirds of
all the distilled spirits consumed.” That said, despite the uneven distribution between person A
drinking two drinks a day and person B drinking 16 drinks per day, everybody was drinking.
Outsiders found the level of American drinking astounding, though noted the sheer quantity of
drinking meant the average person was less belligerent due to high tolerance. Alexis
de Toqueville recounted in his famous 1830’s observations of the United States that legislating
against alcohol in the form of taxation was impossible (8). A different US visitor found that
American alcohol consumption was stereotypically Irish in amount, but functional. (5,7) It’s
an unfair assessment because Americans drank more than the Irish in 1830.
Foreigners weren’t the only ones astonished. A home-grown movement against society’s drunkenness,
the Temperance Movement, picked up steam in the 1830’s and 40’s. Early activists advocated
something closer to a dictionary definition of temperance, moderation or voluntary abstinence.
For example, some of the first well-known temperance advocates were reformed drinkers
themselves: the so-called Washingtonians. These men began their anti-alcohol advocacy
in a Baltimore tavern, and called on other drinkers to join them in abstention (7).
But it wasn’t long before the temperance movement radicalized to advocate government policy that
would restrict access to alcohol, even outright bans. The state of Maine became the first state
to ban the production and sale of alcohol in 1851 (9). A dozen other states tried similar laws.
Aside from Maine, the cultural backlash to alcohol came before the movement to ban it. By 1850,
alcohol consumption dropped in half. It wasn’t an even distribution though:
half the population stopped drinking; the other half continued unabated. Again by 1850,
around 5 million anti-alcohol pamphlets were passed out around the country, placing a wedge
between these two halves of society (10). Many narratives about alcohol in America pause
around this time, 1850’s and 60’s because of the Civil War. Indeed,
alcohol use unsurprisingly went up as the Union and Confederacy
fought between 1861 and ‘65 (11). But the Temperance Movement picked back up
in the decades after the Civil War, with women leading the charge. Many women activists made
their name in this period: Eliza ‘Mother’ Thompson, Frances Willard, Amelia Bloomer,
Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. There was a large deal of crossover between those
advocating against alcohol, and those advocating for women’s suffrage. It’s a logical funnel:
in this period, American women had no right to control a house’s finances, no right to divorce,
no sexual protections within marriage - it’s easy to see how a woman could be defenseless
against alcoholic husbands and fathers. The path to rights at home went through political suffrage.
It’s no coincidence that the 19th amendment to the US Constitution codifying women’s suffrage
came directly after the 18th amendment banning the production and sale of intoxicating liquors.
At the start of the 20th century, consumption was only a shadow of the 7 gallons of pure
alcohol per person per year in 1830. Between 1900 and 1915, the average
hung around 2.5 gallons per person per year - still about a dozen drinks per week. (12)
But those declines weren’t enough to stop the burgeoning Temperance Movement. On January 16,
1919, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified: the Prohibition of the manufacture,
sale, or transportation of alcohol was the law of the land.
But it wasn’t to last even 15 years: Enforcement of prohibition was spotty
at best, arguably led to a wild increase in organized crime, and alleviated none of the
vice and poverty advocates had promised. The 21st amendment, which repealed Prohibition,
was ratified on December 5, 1933. Thereafter, American consumption of alcohol resumed at a
reported level under the pre-prohibition era, peaking again at 2 and three-quarter
gallons of pure alcohol in 1981 (13). American drinking dwindled modestly since,
dropping in the 90’s to just over 2 gallons per person per year. The most
recent data I could find suggested people drink about 2 and a third gallons per year,
roughly 10 drinks each week on average. That’s far from ideal, but not the drunken republic
that 19th century writers described. And this is where I got stuck in the story. It’s
every writer’s nightmare: You ask, “Why does this matter?”, and you don’t know. It’s why I’m sitting
in this chair and not the chair I originally recorded this video in. I talked about outsized
alcohol consumption in the 19th century, efforts to tame it, and its eventual taming. So what?
I felt distant from this subject. I’ve been so lucky in life to not have a disordered
relationship with alcohol, so I didn’t see myself in the story. 19th century ‘drunkards’ - it’s
more of a curiosity than a humanization of the past. Illustrate the quantities consumed. Talk
about poor access to safe drinking water. Laugh at the anecdotes of babies getting rum. Sucks to
get hooked early. Not much more to add. But I got up one morning after binging-eating
and purging, something I’ve struggled with as long as I can remember. I stepped on the scale, and saw
that not only had I already gained something like 5 or 6 pounds since the start of the year, but
by binging salty fatty food the previous evening, the scale was showing an even worse number.
For anyone who’s ever had this experience, you know it can mess up your day. It can
spiral and mess up a week, a month - hell, I once didn’t upload to this YouTube channel for
20 months in large part due to shame of showing myself on camera.
And standing up on that scale, my brain made a first-draft of an idea, fairly crude: we’re
not drunk now, we’re fat. As drunkenness has gone down, we’ve substituted other substances. But like
I said, that was just the crude first draft. And I felt disrespectful comparing disordered alcohol
consumption to disordered eating. Comparing alcoholism to opioid addiction didn’t feel right
either. Every experience is unique. The second draft in my head looked for
an explanation. What are we soothing with consumption, be it 1800’s 1900’s, 21st century? A
character in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle spends his earnings from a Chicago slaughterhouse
in a nearby pub on liquor that warms the core and numbs the industrial misery.
Maybe there’s a comparison. In grad school, a professor introduced us to a Rolling
Stone song from 1966, “Mother’s Little Helper”, about a stressed housewife:
Mother needs something today to calm her down And though she's not really ill, there's a
little yellow pill She goes running for
the shelter of her mother's little helper Yes, the Rolling Stones were from the UK, but I
think the song applies. It’s about soothing modern life with Valium. That soothing was facilitated
and exploited by all sorts of prescriptions in the ensuing decades, up to today.
And I bring it back to myself, not to minimize others’ addictions, but just to empathize. When
I’m overworked and feeling unhappy, I don’t soothe with liquor or pills; I soothe with food.
I’ve turned to fast food for decades; junk, fries, fountain drinks - it lets out a bit of
dopamine - calms me down a bit, then I plod along with modern stress.
Maybe we’re connected through time through our need to soothe.That’s rough draft two.
I also considered how the things we consume to soothe are the most available,
sometimes by design. Liquor was cheap. Pills come for the price of your insurance co-pay. Sugar,
salt and fat are the most affordable parts of diet now. The things we use to poison ourselves
are the things most available. Again, not really ground-breaking thinking.
But here’s draft three, and you’re welcome to refine it below. The thing that connects
all these disordered consumptions is our puritan approach to one another.
Puritan beliefs fueled many of the earliest Europeans who came to America,
and it surely influenced the religious zeal temperance activists had when it
came to prohibiting alcohol. Overconsumption of liquor was a weakness, a sin - one to be
dealt with through abstention and repenting. Alcoholic anonymous, repent abstain.
The general attitude toward drug addiction was that way for a long time as well. Addiction to
drugs, to pills was individual weakness, weakness to be dealt with through abstention and repenting.
Narcotics anonymous, repent, abstain. When it comes to my own vice, binge eating,
that attitude prevails as well. Overeaters anonymous - repent, abstain.
That centuries-old American puritanism feeds my self-loathing. I’m sure society does judge me for
my weight, but there’s no harsher judge than me. I should be stronger and abstain, and repent.
I’m addicted, disordered and I can empathize with Americans, anyone who has struggled with
overconsumption of any kind at any time. Experiences aren’t the same - many are far
worse than mine, no doubt. But I relate. And now the alcohol anecdotes at the start of this video,
13 drinks a day, babies getting rum - it all doesn’t seem that funny.
The sources I encountered researching this video treat America’s historic alcohol
problem more like a quaint novelty. Prohibition was a weird blip that interrupted the party.
But our alcohol problem wasn’t quaint, it was dark. And prohibition wasn’t a weirdo
overreaction; it was a puritan reaction, the same ineffective
reaction we have to all our problems. Here’s to hoping for future generations
that we find a happier balance between the anarchy of individualism and the puritan’s sledgehammer.
It’s a mocktail. Later y’all.