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CHAPTER 1

TEMPERANCE!

Quite possibly the ugliest statue in all of Washington, D.C., is the Temperance Fountain, erected in 1882 by California dentist Henry Cogswell. Two intertwined dolphins once spewed water from their mouths. A large crane rests on top. At the base, covered by metal grates, is a well that the city filled with ice. There once was a metal cup that allowed passersby to get a drink of water. Eventually the city tired of filling the fountain, and the water was turned off. At one point, a wire hanger — the kind you get at the dry cleaners — hung from the bird. People have long forgotten the meaning of the statue. They wanted to forget temperance, as temperance gave us prohibition. And prohibition didn't turn out so well.

Cogswell made his fortune in the California gold rush and lived in San Francisco. He funded dozens of these temperance statues nationwide, but only a handful survive. There is nearly an identical fountain in New York's Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side, which was once a German neighborhood known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany). You wonder how successful such heavy-handed moralizing was to a community that made beer into America's favorite alcoholic beverage.

Washington's Temperance Fountain was initially located at the corner of Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, but it traded places with the monument to the Grand Army of the Republic when the city created Indiana Plaza. Ironically, for years the statue stood in front of the Apex Liquor Store.

The location of the fountain is quite significant: it is halfway between the White House and the U.S. Capitol along Pennsylvania Avenue. It is located directly across from the National Archives, which was established in 1931 on the site that housed Center Market. And adjacent to the market was Hooker's Division, Washington's red-light district. This was a very poor neighborhood of shanties and tenements, a den of brothels, gambling parlors and saloons. The division ran from Tenth Street to Fifteenth Street, Northwest — roughly where the Ronald Reagan Building and Department of Commerce are now. Washington Post columnist and historian George Rothwell Brown called Hooker's Division "the city's most evil eyesore." Cogswell's message was clear to all who passed by: drink water, not whiskey.

Four words are inscribed around the Temperance Fountain's canopy: FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY and TEMPERANCE. The first three words come right out the Bible from 1 Corinthians 13, which was St. Paul's famous letter on the nature of love: "And now these three remain: faith, hope and charity. But the greatest of these is charity." Later English versions of the Bible translate charity as love. The word "temperance" wasn't part of Paul's letter, so why is it on the fountain? The answer is that the temperance movement was tying the Bible to its cause, which was to keep the nation from drinking alcohol.

Henry Cogswell and temperance have largely been forgotten — some in Congress wanted to tear down the fountain — but a group exists to celebrate the fountain's ugliness: the Cogswell Society. It was established in 1972 when several members of the Federal Trade Commission began meeting for lunch and telling jokes. The members wear ribbons around their necks, at the bottom of which is a wire hanger, symbolizing the clothes hanger that hung from the crane for years — and in jest reminding people how irrelevant the temperance cause had become. I was invited to speak at one of the society's lunches. When the host raised his glass "To temperance!" all responded in unison, "I'll drink to that!"

Temperance didn't rise out of a vacuum but was instead a response to a nationwide whiskey-drinking binge in the early nineteenth century. Whiskey was cheap in the early American republic. When people settled in the Ohio River Valley — in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee — they grew far too much corn, but there were few roads to get their crops to market. Instead, they distilled their excess corn into whiskey, which weighed a lot less than an entire crop of corn and could command many times the price.

There were virtually no taxes on whiskey. After the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, Congress eventually repealed the whiskey taxes. By the 1820s, the nation was on a huge whiskey-drinking binge, the likes of which we haven't seen before or since. Men were doing most of the heavy drinking, as they took to saloons for cheap booze. A classic study on the whiskey binge and the origins of the temperance movement — published in 1979 by W.J. Rorabaugh and known as The Alcoholic Republic — estimated that the binge peaked in 1830. That year, Americans drank 5.2 gallons of ethanol per person (and 7.1 gallons per man when women and children are excluded). This was more than double what Americans drink today.

So what was "temperance?" Temperance was a nineteenth-century social reform movement that believed that banning alcohol would improve American society, reduce crime and poverty and make everyone more respectably middle class. The temperance movement lasted for more than a century and culminated in the Prohibition era.

The movement was thoroughly Protestant and evangelical. In fact, we may call it one of the country's first faith-based initiatives. It began with a few congregational leaders in New York and Massachusetts and picked up steam during the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s. The Methodist Episcopalian Church became the first church to embrace temperance as part of its official doctrine in 1830. Many American-born churches, such as the Mormon Church, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Christian Scientists, originated during this time — and they all embraced temperance as part of their doctrine.

The movement spread to the Midwest and into the Deep South by the end of the century. It was particularly influential in rural areas; it had a much harder time in cities, where people tended to socialize in saloons. Catholic immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Poland, as well as Jews from eastern Europe, tended to settle in cities and brought their drinking habits with them. These groups had no theological issues with drinking. The temperance movement heaped scorn on Catholics, as they didn't represent their ideal of a dry, Protestant America.

When you think of the word "temperance," you might think moderation — and that's what the first leaders meant as they tried to get people to drink beer and wine instead of distilled spirits. They didn't mean outright abstinence. But more radical people had seized control of the movement by the late 1820s, and they pushed abstinence.

Temperance was the other kind of abstinence — not merely drinking in moderation, but completely refraining from it instead. Being a teetotaler was virtuous, while a drinker (or a "drunkard") was someone with loose morals. To them there was no such thing as moderation — anyone who drank alcohol was on the slippery slope to alcoholism. A drunkard spent his wages on whiskey, leaving his family destitute. To those in the temperance movement, alcohol was the root of evil, and it had to be purged from society. Showing its religious roots, it even had a handy name for alcohol: Demon Rum.

Protestant preachers saw all of the hard-core whiskey drinking and couldn't fathom that Jesus would have ever drank, so they developed a theory that the Jews drank unfermented wine. That was not archaeologically, biblically, historically or scientifically accurate, and it showed no understanding of the central role of wine in Judaism. Wine is mentioned in every chapter of the Bible except for the book of Jonah. Yet temperance advocates had no way of making unfermented wine. They took it on faith that Jesus was a teetotaler like them.

And then, as they say, a miracle happened.

In the 1860s, many French wines were mysteriously going bad. The French government asked scientist Louis Pasteur to investigate. Pasteur figured out how fermentation actually works by watching the process under a microscope. He observed that natural enzymes on the skins of grapes come into contact with the grape's sugar when it is crushed. The enzymes consume the sugar, and the byproduct is alcohol. But Pasteur also discovered that bacteria were getting in the wine, which was spoiling the product. To counter this, he invented a process to flash-heat the wine to kill the bacteria without damaging the wine. Pasteurization was born. This is what we use to keep milk from spoiling.

There was a temperance-minded dentist named Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, who was a communion steward at the Vineland Methodist Church in New Jersey. He wanted to give his congregation an alternative to wine. He read up on Pasteur's research and figured that he could use flash heating to stop fermentation. In 1869, he successfully pasteurized Concord grape juice, giving birth to Welch's Grape Juice, a staple for Protestant communion services ever since. The Methodists officially required all of their churches to start using "unfermented wine at the Lord's table" in 1880, and it's been that way ever since.

The Temperance Fountain may be the last remnant of the movement in Washington, but there was once a thriving temperance business scene. Temperance advocates operated their own hotel. The Holly Tree Hotel and Dining Rooms was located at 518 Ninth Street, Northwest. Visitors to the nation's capital could be assured of fine food and no alcohol on the premises. (The site was later torn down; there is an office building now.) Just around the corner, on E Street, was Temperance Hall (914 E Street), built in 1843 by the Freeman's Total Abstinence Society. It was razed in 1935; eventually the spot became the site of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building.

For the first half of the 1800s, the temperance movement was overshadowed by the national issue of slavery. But after the Civil War, a new generation of temperance leaders pushed forward — Henry Cogswell was one member. It all began with an impromptu grass-roots protest. Inspired by a temperance lecture, a group of woman in Hillsboro, Ohio, decided one winter day in 1873 to picket a saloon with hymns and prayers. They were tired of their husbands' philandering ways. This tactic proved so successful that most of the town's saloons closed down in less than two weeks. The women were immortalized as "crusaders."

Just a year later, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was founded in 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio. It was led by Frances Willard, who was the first woman to have a statue erected in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Today we'd call the WCTU an issue advocacy group. WCTU members pledged to raise their families in alcohol-free homes. Probably the best-known member of the WCTU was Carrie Nation, who embarrassed the group by taking an axe to demolish illegal saloons around the country.

As women couldn't vote yet, the WCTU focused on education and moral suasion. They would warn children in the classroom about the dangers of alcohol. They held a quack experiment for the children: a WCTU representative would pour alcohol directly onto the brain of a dead cow or sheep, immediately turning it gray. The experiment had no scientific merit, but that was beside the point, which was to frighten children so they wouldn't touch alcohol. Generations of children grew up feeling guilty about ever touching alcohol, so strong had the stigma become. The WCTU's local office was at 522 Sixth Street, Northwest.

The temperance movement was closely tied in with other Christian social issues. We date many of our blue laws from this period — for example, laws that required businesses to close on Sundays, as people were supposed to be in church and not shopping. Even the ice cream sundae was named so as not to offend Sabbatarians. The WCTU successfully lobbied to close Washington saloons on Sundays.

The women's suffrage movement was also growing at this time but didn't have nearly the support — or the membership — as the WCTU. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony realized that they had to tie suffrage to temperance if they ever wanted to succeed in getting the vote. The efforts of these two movements — suffrage and temperance — would ultimately culminate in two Constitutional amendments that went into effect in 1920. It was no coincidence that women got the vote and alcohol was outlawed in the same year. However, the alliance between women and temperance broke apart once women had the vote and decided that they had earned a place at the speakeasy.

RUM ROW

Henry Cogswell picked a strategic spot for his Temperance Fountain at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue. The "Avenue," as locals simply called it, was the main thoroughfare of the time. Many bars, hotels, restaurants and theaters were located along the way.

Raymond Clapper described Pennsylvania Avenue for the American Mercury in 1927: "It was an Appian Way of Bacchus, with forty-seven bars to its mile. Probably nowhere in America were there such superb drinking facilities in equally compact form." At Fourteenth Street, Northwest, the Avenue converges with E Street, better known as Rum Row.

"Almost from the earliest days old E Street was the center of Washington's sporting life, and particularly its night life," wrote George Rothwell Brown in his 1930 history of the district. It grew up organically: congressmen needed a place to reside during their months in Washington, so hotels like the Willard and the Old Ebbitt House (now the Old Ebbitt Grill) sprung up. These men also needed a place to drink, gamble and socialize, so saloons sprung up in the area — especially Rum Row. Happy hour started every day at noon with a free lunch in most bars.

Rum Row lay along the north side of E Street, just east of Fourteenth Street and directly across from the District Building. It was quite a colorful part of town — a series of saloons where journalists, lobbyists and politicians rubbed shoulders. Among the bars and restaurants were Dennis Mullany's, Greason's, Gerstenberg's, Engel's (the Washington Post Building sat between the latter two, and the Munsey Building, home to the Washington Times, was also on the block), the French restaurant Perread and Shoomaker's (1331 — 33 E Street).

Just across Fourteenth Street to the west, the fabulous Willard Hotel had quite the reputation as a quality drinking establishment — and still does with the Round Robin Bar. Around the corner was Losekam's restaurant (1323 F Street), where critic H.L. Mencken liked to sip ale when he was in town. Down the street, at 1234 Pennsylvania Avenue, was Hancock's, one of the best-known restaurants in the city, as well as Tim Sullivan's. Famed bartender Henry Thomas worked at George Driver's Bar (605 Pennsylvania Avenue) for fourteen years; he also put in time at Shoomaker's, the Willard and at a number of other bars. Thomas ended up working at the Chevy Chase Country Club during the Prohibition era.

Shoomaker's was one of the more notable hangouts in Washington. Two German immigrants, Otto Hertzog and William Shoomaker (the latter's name was Anglicized), came to the United States in the 1850s and fought as Union officers in the Civil War. They founded Hertzog and Shoomaker's at 1331 E Street in 1858. They not only sold cocktails but were also importers who sold retail to the public. Most people just called it "Shoo's."

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Excerpted from "Prohibition in Washington, D.C."
by .
Copyright © 2011 Garrett Peck.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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