At War with King Alcohol - A Review
Booze. Really…it’s something absolutely essential to understand when evaluating culture on any level. We are a drinking people – and always have been, for what it’s worth. Of course, sentiments concerning drinking have ebbed and flowed (as they still do today) depending on all sorts of things: religious or moral convictions against it, reformers’ concerns with substance abuse, liquor as an ever-present refreshment underscoring social norms and practices, its use for medicinal purposes, even the consumption of intoxicating beverages as an entry into perceived manhood. Liquor touches nearly every historical event in some way.
In the nineteenth century, those who sought to rid humanity of sin aimed directly at alcohol. These temperance reformers gained a great deal of traction within the broader reform movement, shouting from the rooftops about the evils of drink in relation to licentious behavior, poverty, and especially domestic abuse. And people listened too. As the first half of the 19th century unfolded, more and more reform-minded people joined the ranks of the temperance movement with religious (quite literally) conviction…as part of an effort to perfect humanity in anticipation of the final judgment of mankind.
And dammit if the Civil War didn’t come along to screw up all that hard work. Megan L. Bever’s new book, At War with King Alcohol, emphasizes how Americans during the war years contended with hooch, the hard stuff, rattle-skull, or liquid courage…or what they might have called it. You see, and this may not be so surprising, when tens of thousands of young men come together under highly stressful circumstances, they tend to seek out some sort of relief from there woes…maybe a momentary liberation from the prospect of death – who knows. I can’t say that I blame them.
But as Bever so astutely notes, many middle-class reformers at the time saw the dangers inherent to drinking in relation to all sorts of war-related things…particularly how the war seemed to sideline their plans. And it is this that really strikes me as the most compelling reason to dig into this book: the war rendered all sorts of things messy…even the sweeping idea of reform. So, here’s a few things to simply wet your beak (drinking metaphor intentional…) and encourage you to grab a copy of this book. Reformers, as Bever notes, were highly agitated when the slavery issue superseded their efforts against alcohol. What this suggests to me is that the reform movement (which included abolition, of course) was not necessarily unified in its primary focus…and there were contentions within (just ask any women’s rights activists during the era…). There is also an interesting rural/urban/class tension going on throughout which I found fascinating. Middle-class reformers did not really reach into everyone’s world. Temperance fell on deaf ears in the rural South, for one example, where farmers relied on distilling as part of their agricultural life and livelihood.
But the most salient theme at work here is the notion of masculinity…what makes a man, as it were, in relation to alcohol. Depending on who you ask, imbibing had the potential to detract from one’s manly status especially as it intersected with duty and patriotism. While on one hand, booze in wartime was something of a “rite of passage” or a reward for services rendered in the army. But on the other, and this is where things get interesting…many soldiers and their families at home shared a real concern that too much in the way of libation would tarnish their character or compel them to shrink before their duty. This is instructive work when we consider just how the home and battle fronts were profoundly connected. Even the manufacture of liquor, as Bever reveals, had the effect of compromising patriotic fervor…when precious resources were “wasted” in the distillation process.
I love it when historians focus on a subject that seems so obviously understood (i.e. – soldiers like getting hammered and it causes problems) but then explore it in ways that get the reader to reexamine said subject in relation to something far more complicated than we might think. So, with this in mid I highly recommend At War with King Alcohol – pick up a copy and let me know what you think. And…If you want to check out all the other reviews on this page, I encourage you to click HERE for my my two cents on some of the most interesting new scholarship on the Civil War and lots of other subjects.
Salut!
Keith