The Market Revolution by Sellers Charles;

Author:Sellers, Charles;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 1991-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

As Americans drank more and harder liquor, they drank more compulsively in different settings. Moderate drams, which conditioned against intoxication, gave way to more frequent and more drunken communal binges. Men fell increasingly into solitary binges, followed by hangover and a week or month of remorseful sobriety until the next binge. Many solitary topers–especially, perhaps, young men of the best families–became hopeless alcoholics. Consumption estimates and family records lend credence to the temperance crusaders’ warnings that America was “becoming a nation of drunkards.” Most of the prominent families studied by historians, from business Tappans to clerical Beechers to presidential Adamses, seem to have had one or more victims.

Cross-culture studies ascribe this pattern of hard drinking to the anxiety of frustrated ambition. The successful, by contrast, drank wine, while rural cider (and later working-class beer) registered the contentment or resignation of the unambitious. The great American whiskey binge was fed primarily by the anxiety of selfmaking men.32

The psychodynamics are most evident in sons of successful fathers. When the national temperance crusade opened in the jubilee year, the country’s two highest executive officials were suffering a remarkably similar anguish over their two oldest sons. While President Adams grieved over an alcoholic and an incipient suicide, Secretary Clay despaired of an alcoholic and a lunatic. Both fathers concentrated on a third boy the pressures for success that had broken their first- and secondborn.

Like Charles Francis Adams, Henry Clay, Jr., was driven by an illustrious sire’s insistence that “on you my hopes are chiefly centered.” Sent to West Point under paternal injunction to devote himself “steadily and constantly” to his studies and “win the first honor if possible,” he managed to graduate second. At his father’s wish–trusting “not to my immature judgment, but to your knowledge and experience”–young Henry studied law under his father’s supervision and established a modestly successful practice. Even modest success cost this dutiful son more than great effort. Paternal warnings–whether his life would be “happy or wretched depends mainly on yourself–evoked self-making anxiety as well as self-making effort. “Like all young men of ambitious and aspiring temperaments,” the junior Clay confessed, “the mere possibility of ill success keeps alive in me a thousand unnecessary and annoying fears.” Containing his fears without resort to alcohol left him “so jealous and irritable in his temper,” according to visitor Harriet Martineau, “that there is no living with him.”33

Psychic disorders or opium addiction often cropped up along with alcoholism in self-making families. Opium and its derivative laudanum were widely disseminated by doctors’ prescriptions and patent medicines to ease middle-class anxiety. Ebenezer Breed, who pioneered the Lynn shoe trade, spent his last years an opium addict in the local poorhouse. James K. Polk’s father died with “his mind not being rite… under the influence of lodnam”; four of this driven politician’s brothers died young (most or all alcoholic), one of them not long after “a spell of drinking” that “had like to a killed him”; and a sister’s tantrums were so violent that relatives urged her husband “to lock her up and conquer her by force.

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