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100 years ago, the disciples of governmental dominance were celebrating the enactment of the 18th Amendment. The 'devil's potions' were finally a constitutionally banned substance and the courts were powerless to subvert the will of the majority.
Prohibition, which became the law of the land in January 1920, was the product of enormous middle-class energy dedicated to eliminating sin—gambling, drinking, anarchy, sloth—through legislation. Within this crusade, beer was hardly a neutral substance.
As the favored drink of the German and Irish working class, it was shorthand in temperance circles for disorderly taverns, abandoned wives, laziness, unemployment—even, during World War I, anti-Americanism. According to temperance advocates, Prohibition's destruction of the saloon marked nothing less than a triumph of order over disorder, self-control over dissipation. For the next decade, marijuana remained fully legal in most states, but beer was a federal crime. It serves to remind us that the legal code is often no more than a fascist effort to mold culture into a particular ideal image of the day. |
" I'm very leery about ethnic jokes now in my position. So, the only ones I can tell are Irish. You know, my father told me when I was that high that the Irish built the jails in this country and then filled them."
- Ronald Reagan, March, 1988, at Pat Troy's Irish Pub. |
Yet the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not amount to a complete "prohibition" on all forms of alcohol. It banned only the manufacture, sale or transportation of alcohol "for beverage purposes"—in other words, for the pleasure and delight of socializing and inebriation. This directive covered a substantial proportion of the nation's imbibers, to be sure, but it also left open certain loopholes for the framers of the Volstead Act, the federal law that finally put the amendment into effect. It excluded all alcohol—mainly sacramental wines—consumed for religious purposes. Hair tonics, perfumes, toilet waters and other cosmetic products were similarly exempt. Not least, it excluded alcohol prescribed by physicians as a treatment for any number of acute and chronic ills. It was in the context of this last exemption that the fight over "medical beer" unfolded.
Temperance advocates denounced the "medical beer" campaign as an attempt to play fast and loose with the law—an effort, they said, that could lead only to "chaos" and "Bolshevism." Prohibition's opponents, by contrast, urged the measure as nothing less than a matter of life and death. "Since Prohibition went into effect I have been approached by a number of physicians who appealed to me for beer on the ground that it was absolutely necessary for the welfare of their patients," brewer Col. Jacob Ruppert, who owned the Yankees from 1915 until his death in 1939, told a New York Times reporter. "I was not in a position to help them."
The idea of alcohol as medicine was not new. As historian W. J. Rorabaugh wrote, Americans in the early 18th century classified whiskey, rum and other liquors as "medications that could cure colds, fevers, snakebites, frosted toes, and broken legs, and as relaxants that would relieve depression, reduce tension, and enable hardworking laborers to enjoy a moment of happy, frivolous camaraderie." Even the dour Puritan minister Cotton Mather, fearful enough of sin and subversion to help purge Salem of witches, believed that alcohol, used in moderation, could be "a Creature of God."
Temperance advocates denounced the "medical beer" campaign as an attempt to play fast and loose with the law—an effort, they said, that could lead only to "chaos" and "Bolshevism." Prohibition's opponents, by contrast, urged the measure as nothing less than a matter of life and death. "Since Prohibition went into effect I have been approached by a number of physicians who appealed to me for beer on the ground that it was absolutely necessary for the welfare of their patients," brewer Col. Jacob Ruppert, who owned the Yankees from 1915 until his death in 1939, told a New York Times reporter. "I was not in a position to help them."
The idea of alcohol as medicine was not new. As historian W. J. Rorabaugh wrote, Americans in the early 18th century classified whiskey, rum and other liquors as "medications that could cure colds, fevers, snakebites, frosted toes, and broken legs, and as relaxants that would relieve depression, reduce tension, and enable hardworking laborers to enjoy a moment of happy, frivolous camaraderie." Even the dour Puritan minister Cotton Mather, fearful enough of sin and subversion to help purge Salem of witches, believed that alcohol, used in moderation, could be "a Creature of God."
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Once Prohibition took effect, many doctors championed alcohol as medicine. "I have always maintained that every family ought to have an alcoholic stimulant in the house all the time," one physician told the New York Times. "There is nothing more valuable in emergency." The doctor himself always took a drink at the end of the day—"It braces me up," he explained—and often prescribed it for patients stricken with "nerves." For pneumonia, he recommended a shot or two of whiskey.
But if many doctors conceded the efficacy of hard liquor, the case of beer was rather more controversial. Beer's champions often pointed to its relaxing qualities, and to its nutritional value. In a lengthy ode to British ale, for instance, one writer suggested that beer was so chock-full of vitamins that it had saved the "British race" from extinction during food-scarce plague years. |
Many 'therapeutics' of a century ago have been broadly replaced with more recent innovations. Some practitioners are rethinking some of the more modern orthodoxies, especially at a very personalized directive to a particular patient's overall health.
This just underscores the dangers of banning whole classes of therapeutics in statutory code, or mandating a particular regimen for everyone. |
