They always preach best with a skinful....”
By the middle of the nineteenth century the other sectarian bodies, the Presbyterians, the Independents or Congregationalists, and the Baptists, had followed the Methodists in adopting the Mohammedan fanaticism of total abstinence.
The final step of all, that of attempting to compel everyone to be teetotal by means of Prohibition laws, was taken not in England where total abstinence was first preached in the name of religion, but in America. In England the sectarian “Nonconformist” has always been in the minority and after the brief seventeenth century Puritan supremacy the nation turned fiercely against them. In America, on the other hand, they were in a majority from the first. Virginia was settled by Anglicans and Maryland by Roman Catholics, but the other English colonies were Puritan almost to a man. The colony of Massachusetts Bay was an absolute Congregationalist theocracy from its foundation in 1629 for over half a century.
In England, during the short Puritan ascendancy there (1649-60), the sectaries had used the full power of the State to suppress popular festivals and the decorative side of life. It was forbidden to keep Christmas or Easter. At the other end of the scale, it was forbidden to bait bears, “not because the sport gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators,” as Macaulay has it in a famous phrase. In one of their culminating atrocities, the closing of the theatres, the Puritans displayed their characteristic hypocrisy. Instead of frankly avowing that theatrical performances offended their peculiar religion they gave as reasons for closing them the plague and the Civil War. But when plague and the Civil War had ceased, did they permit the theatres to reopen? By no means. Dancing and card playing they held to be cardinal sins. Their garments must be sad-coloured, although in this respect but little worse than men’s clothes to-day. Their “meeting houses,” which they substituted for churches, were purposely made as bare as barns.
But there was one outrage which they did not attempt. They made no attempt to forbid the fermented drinks which immemorial tradition and the example of Our Lord himself permitted to Christian men. It is true that they refused to drink healths, for the practice added ceremony to feasting and they held it to be a cause of intemperance. Beyond this they did not go. Incidentally it should be noted that when the Puritans ruled England none but fermented drinks were known. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were curiosities until after the Restoration. At all events, fermented drinks were the one form of social pleasure permitted to Englishmen under Puritan rule.
In New England, Calvinism ran riot. In Europe it had been the creed of a minority living in the midst of nations firm in the traditions of Christendom. Therefore, while it had been bad enough in Europe, it had never felt itself omnipotent. In New England, on the contrary, Calvinism had isolated communities founded especially for its glorification, and the result was horrible. “Its records read like those of a madhouse where religious maniacs have broken loose and locked up their keepers. We hear of men stoned to death for kissing their wives on the Sabbath, of lovers pilloried or flogged at the cart’s tail for kissing each other at all without licence from the deacons, the whole culminating in a mad panic of wholesale demonism and witch-burning....”[41] The picture could be supplemented ad infinitum by a study of the town records of the New England Puritans. For the elaboration of it, one of their own descendants, Brooks Adams, has written a book, the “Emancipation of Massachusetts,” in which they hanged, gibbeted and damned for ever, and to that book I refer my readers who may be curious in the matter. They were appalling people.
For the purposes of this study, the essential thing to remember is that the eighteenth century slackening of Puritan fervour in America was not death but sleep. Or, to use another metaphor, when its stream appeared to be drying up, it was still running strongly underground. Such a man as John Brown, with his savage and almost crazy fanaticism, would have been perfectly at home in Cromwell’s army, or with Praise-God-Barebones and his ilk.
After the Civil War, American industrialism began to expand enormously. The “captain of industry,” the second partner to the sixteenth century alliance against tradition, was growing into a giant. Insufficient support in this quarter seems to have been a contributing cause of the failure of the first American Prohibition movement. This flourished for a time about the middle of the nineteenth century. It was the work of pure fanaticism, and for a time it had great success. All the New England States, plus New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, and South Dakota, Passed State prohibition laws. But in a few years these laws began to be repealed. Finally, the Maine Law alone remained on the statute books ... and continued to be so often violated in practice as to be a laughing-stock to the whole country.
Naturally, the fanatics could not have won even their temporary successes without the aid of other sorts of men. From the first America had been a “hard liquor” country. Whisky and rum had been the national drinks, and drunkenness had been common. The saloon keeper, like most traffickers in Protestant countries, was but little restrained by public opinion. “Business was business.” Wine was a luxury for the rich, unknown to the populace, and beer seems to have been almost unknown. The frontier, with its tendency toward crudity of thought and its utter lack of social restraint, has deeply influenced the American mind, predisposing it toward rough-hewn solutions of any troublesome problem, thus reinforcing the dominant Protestantism of the country, with its reliance upon taboo. As yet the influence of Catholicism with its rounded, universal ethic was slight. But notwithstanding all these contributing forces, a short experience of Prohibition was quite enough for the unhappy States which tried it.
Not until after the early years of the twentieth century did the agitation again gather strength. In the interim, new forces had appeared, some favourable, some opposed to the destruction of Christian liberty. On the surface, it appeared to many that liberty had been strengthened. Catholicism was growing, chiefly through immigration from Ireland, Italy and the Slavic countries. Immigrants from Germany began to brew beer, so that even the populace began to see there was a possible rival to hard liquor. California began to make wine. With the disappearance of the frontier, men believed that the crudity of mind bred by frontier conditions would soon be resolved into an appreciation of the necessary complexities of settled civilization. So far, this idea has since been proved mistaken, but, in itself, it was not ridiculous. Far sillier was another contemporary notion, namely, that the increasing ease and frequency of communication would bring about catholicity of mind and a decline of particularism and provincialism in general.