American Rum 24: Temperance

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AMERICAN RUM 24: TEMPERANCE

So far we have seen how rum played a central role in the lives of the people of the Continental Colonies and the soldiers who fought for Independence. And yet it was precisely with the victory of the Revolution that the decline of American Rum began. This decline was due to two main reasons: a new negative view of alcohol, drunkenness and spirits in general, and therefore of the most common of spirits, rum, among the cultivated classes; and the contemporary emergence of a powerful new competitor: whiskey. In this article we’ll deal with the first reason, with the help of a very good and useful book: “The Alcoholic Republic” published by W.J. Rorabaugh in 1979; and all quotes are from this book.

During the XVIII century, in the middle of the large surge of alcohol consumption we know, a number of pioneering physicians had become aware of the dangers associated with large alcohol consumption.

“As early as 1720 some scientists had concluded that alcohol was poisonous, and by 1730 this view was gaining support. James Oglethorpe, for example, attempted to ban rum from his Georgia colony at the urging of the Rev. Stephen Hales, one of the colony’s trustees, a physiologist, and the author of two anti-spirits treatises. Then, during the 1740s, American doctors began to investigate the quaintly named West Indies Dry Gripes. This was a painful, debilitating malady that we now recognize as lead poisoning caused by drinking rum made in lead stills.… rum as the cause of the disease and recommended abstinence, a novel proposal that was contrary to traditional opinion concerning rum’s healthful qualities.”

But it was only after the Revolution that this new image of alcohol was backed up by new arguments and became common among the cultivated classes. Considerations of social control were also involved, similar to those that had in the past led to an attempt to limit the number and the business of the taverns. “While opposition to the taverns developed and then collapsed in the throes of the Revolution, upper class attitudes toward liquor were undergoing change. By the middle of the eighteenth century many educated people had begun to doubt that spirituous liquor was ever a good creature and some began to condemn it altogether.”

Simplifying somewhat, we might say that the new attitude toward alcohol combined the new rationalist approach to life of the Enlightenment, the rise of modern industrial capitalism with its need for a careful, disciplined workforce, and the general advances in science, above all in medicine. In particular, the large diffusion of the practice of conducting scientific postmortems, a novelty of this period, revealed the great damage that could be caused by excessive consumption of alcohol. Alcohol that, moreover, was often, as we know, of very poor quality.

The new aversion to spirits (and to slavery) first emerged among the Quakers and Methodists, and then among other religious denominations. One of the founding texts of the movement was published right at the start of the Revolution, in 1774, “The Potent Enemies of America Laid Open: Being Some Account of the Baneful Effects Attending the Use of Distilled Spirituous Liquors, and the Slavery of the Negroes”, written by John Wesley and Anthony Benezet.

But the strongest blow to the traditional vision of alcohol as something beneficial and health-giving came from the writings and militant work of a renowned physician and patriot Benjamin Rush. He was among other things a friend of John Adams and served for a time as surgeon general in the Continental Army. He published numerous articles, and in 1784 the pamphlet “An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors”. Only a few pages, packed with information on the serious physical and moral damage caused by spirits.

In addition, Rush writes: “ I shall conclude what has been said of the effects of spirituous liquor … a people corrupted with strong drink cannot long be a free people. The rulers of such a community will soon partake of all the vices of that mass from which they are secreted, and all our laws and governments will soon or later bear the same marks of the effects of spirituous liquors which were described formerly upon individuals”. A free people cannot be enslaved by alcohol: this idea of republican virtue was to survive for a long time and culminate in the great temperance movements of the last century.

Rush was not a Teetotaler; though he asked his countrymen to stop drinking spirits entirely, he was not opposed to moderate consumption of fermented beverages such as beer, cider and wine.

The pamphlet was a great success and Rush’s medical and social theories passed into the mainstream of the American elite, though not among the common people, who continued to drink as much as before, with consumption peaking, as we have seen, in 1830. But the work of Benazer and Rush, among others, was not without consequence. They had planted the seeds of the Temperance movements and attracted attention to the economic and social costs of rum consumption, just as its central role in American life was vacillating in the face of new competition from a new beverage: whiskey.

-Article written by Marco Pierini- 

My name is Marco Pierini, I was born in 1954 in a little town in Tuscany (Italy) where I still live. I got a degree in Philosophy in Florence and I studied Political Science in Madrid, but my real passion has always been History. Through History I have always tried to know the world. Life brought me to work in tourism, event organization and vocational training. Then I discovered rum. With Francesco Rufini, I founded La Casa del Rum (The House of Rum), that runs a beach bar and selects Premium Rums in Italy, www.lacasadelrum.it

And finally I have returned back to my initial passion: History, but now it is the History of Rum. Because Rum is not only a great distillate, it’s a world. Produced in scores of countries, by thousands of companies, with an extraordinary variety of aromas and flavors; it has a terrible and fascinating history, made of slaves and pirates, imperial fleets and revolutions.

I have published a book on Amazon: AMERICAN RUM. A Short History of Rum in Early America.