Excerpt: Driven Mad by 'Demon Rum'

By Ian Williams, AlterNet. Posted December 2, 2005.

The great days of Prohibition allowed the New England states to return to their historical roots -- as rum smugglers.

And just as the movers and shakers of the new American republic came to prominence, wealth, and influence as a result of their smuggling and rum trading with the connivance of ineffective enforcement, so too did the new dynasty of the later republic -- the Kennedys -- owe their origins to the trade.

Rum and slavery, Abolition and Prohibition, all shared similar roots in the American mind-set. James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, banned slaves and rum -- and ended up with both. But the same New England Protestant fervor that cried down slavery also cried down the "demon rum." It was not always a well-advised demand.

Abraham Lincoln declared in 1840, when he was an Illinois legislator:

Prohibition will work great injury on the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime of out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes at the very principle upon which our government was founded.

Lincoln's good sense was ignored. Rarely has a democracy taken such a nannying attitude to its citizens as the United States, filling its prisons with perpetrators of victimless crimes, whether in the name of a war on drugs, homosexuality, prostitution, or, for so many years, the war against the Demon Rum. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Republican clergymen castigated the Democrats as "the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," shorthand for Southerners and Irish.

Insanity can be infectious. Much of Canada was afflicted, but mercifully for only a short period before seeing the folly of the project. Discussions of Prohibition in the United States often overlook the Canadian experience, which began by allowing localities to declare themselves dry and moved on to a Prohibition referendum in 1898, which was won by 51 percent of the vote. Quebec exceptionalism saved the day, however. Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier had counted the votes as well, and he noted that Quebec, one of his major support bases, had voted by 81 percent against this crazy Anglo-Protestant idea. He realized that a federally enforced prohibition would precipitate much unease among his French-speaking voters, and so he did not try to implement it.

In the end, the matter was left to the provinces, some of which tried prohibition, while others made liquor a government monopoly. In the Maritime Provinces, such as Nova Scotia, rum had its strongest hold, and they returned large majorities for Prohibition. Nova Scotia mandated Prohibition everywhere except Halifax, which is where most of its people lived, but then it extended it to cover the entire province.

Newfoundland, independent at the time, voted for Prohibition in 1915, but had the good sense to repeal it in 1924, just in time to benefit from the Americans' mistake -- Newfoundland made the rum-running ships for the trade down the coast. It would compete with the French islanders from St. Pierre and Miquelon in smuggling rum -- and whiskey, gin, and anything else potable -- down the New England coast.

But the cunning Frenchies, vestiges of the eighteenth-century rum wars, were quicker off the mark, because they had begun by supplying Newfoundland when it introduced Prohibition in 1915. The rum that the Newfoundlanders imported was, according to Warner Allen, "portentous," and the sometime thriller writer and wine expert used his literary skills to describe it: "Neat, it was the most awe-inspiring liquor I ever tasted. Its smell was terrific, compounded of tar, and leather, and strange sea scents, and if ever there was a drink strong enough to float a handspike, it was the contraband rum of St. Johns, Newfoundland."

The paradox is that most Americans were drinking whiskey, rather than rum, as the American temperance movement lurched on toward Prohibition. But rum had become exalted as the demon spirit. Its rhyming, rhotic, and alliterative qualities allowed it to be used and abused as the epitome of evil, a sort of Platonic idea of mother's ruin, and to be paired with anything with which the preacher disapproved.

Ian Williams writes on the United Nations for AlterNet. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, the Nation and Salon.

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