History
Book Club
History of Alcohol
Wednesday,
July 29, 2020
Bacchus at a Bacchanalia
Wednesday, July 29, 2020. A History of Alcohol. Men have been fermenting fruit and grain and honey for many
thousands of years. The Babylonians, Greeks and Romans had gods and
goddesses and there have been marvelous Bacchanalian feasts and tales of the
dreadful effects of too much alcohol. There have been anti-alcohol
drives, temperance marches, Prohibition. Cultural and health effects of alcohol
usage. [Proposed by Janos Posfai]
Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History
of Alcohol, New York; Gotham Books, 2008.
Iain Gately gives us a tour of alcohol, from drunken
orgies of kings and pharaohs 10,000 years ago to bar room drunken disasters
during Prohibition. From elegant, world
famous artists drinking absinthe in Paris, and some dying from it, to the
crusading figure of Carry Nation, at the turn of the Twentieth century.
It’s
been a quest for the pleasure of drinking alcoholic beverages, the
conviviality, the fun, the wildness, the hangovers, the deaths, and it has been
the stories of fighters to abolish the sale and consumption of alcohol.
Ten
thousand years ago Chinese people were fermenting rice, honey, grapes, and
berries to make beverages that delighted their customers.
In Uruk, Sumer, on the banks the Euphrates,
was the largest city in the world, in 2500 BCE. This city of some 80,000 was in
what is now southern Iraq. They brewed eight styles of beer, which they called kash.
The Sumerians designated the goddess Ninkasi as the goddess of brewing,
and associated women with production and distribution of beer.
Sumerians had
formal drinking sessions, drinking the kash through yard-long straws, out of a
keg-like container. Archeologists have found some of these straws, made of gold
and silver, buried with their owners. A
Sumerian poem, Gilgamesh, ca. 2000 BCE, shows that Sumerians knew about
drunkenness. In the poem the wild man, Enkidu, meets a harlot who
explains the ways of men: “He had never drunken beer. He drank the beer—seven jugs—and became very
expansive and sang with joy.”
In ancient Egypt,
beer was called “hqt” and the workers building the pyramids were given
generous amounts, so it appears the pyramids were built by an army of drunks.
The French and
Indian War (1754-1763) ended with severe restriction on wine and rum shipped to
the colonies, and created more grievances leading up to America’s revolution,
beginning in 1775. Most of the meetings to plot against the British were held
in pubs, and a lot of drinking was going on. John Hancock, the richest man in
the colonies, had made his fortune shipping alcohol, and Sam Adams was a malt
merchant. The men dressed as Indians to conduct the “Boston Tea Party”
fortified themselves with quaffs from a huge silver punch bowl. When Paul Revere made his historic ride on
April 19, 1775, the captain of the Medford Minutemen gave him a drink of rum
that “would have made a rabbit bite a bulldog.”
Both sides
fought in the American revolution with the aid of alcohol. Washington’s first
victory, at Trenton, in 1776 was assisted by the drunken condition of the
Hessians when the Americans attacked. In a skirmish later at Eutaw Springs, SC
rebel troops captured a British camp and began to consume their rum ration when
the British counterattacked. The battle ended with 500 rebels killed and 700
British.
A few years
later the British began sending thousands of prisoners to Australia, along with
a Royal Marine regiment and its band.
And thousands of gallons of liquor and wine. The voyage took eight months, and the Marines
acquired more liquor in South America enroute so that the new colony,
established in what became Sydney, NSW, was in no danger of thirst. After the
Marines and the male prisoners were offloaded, and a rough camp established,
the female prisoners were delivered ashore. Drinks were delivered and a night
of wild, drunken celebration followed. That led to the start of native-born non
aborigine Aussies.
In the
mid-1800s, phylloxera wiped out French vineyards. Then it turned out
that the “fix” was to take cuttings from American vines and graft them to
French vines. That hurt French pride,
but it worked. At the same time, with French
wines slowly disappearing, some drinkers took to absinthe, a super bitter
liquor made from wormwood. This became a real hit in the Paris literary and
artistic community. Paul Gauguin,
Vincent van Gogh, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edouard Manet, to name a few, did
some serious damage to themselves drinking huge quantities of the Green Fairy,
as they called it. Some exceptionally talented artists ended up in insane
asylums or died early.
During most of the nineteenth century temperance movements took
on many supporters. Most Rockporters
know the story of Hannah Jumper, a seamstress and a spinster, who gathered up
local preachers and angry housewives and marched through town on July 8th,
1856, smashing kegs and ripping small pubs and bars apart in a reign of terror
that sent scores of men running for cover. Soon after, the Town passed an
ordinance that forbade the selling and serving of alcoholic beverages, which
lasted until 2005.
Author Gately
writes about a more famous character who terrorized Kansas some forty years
later. Carry Nation had a hard life. Daughter of a Kentucky slave owner and a
mother on the edge of insanity, she was born in 1846. She developed a
debilitating bowel ailment in childhood. She spent her teen years caring for
her mother who thought she was Queen Victoria.
Carry married a man who became a drunkard. Shortly after the birth of
their only child, her husband died of delirium tremens. Her child, a
daughter, was born with a disfiguring abscess—her cheek fell off.
Carry
remarried, this time to a preacher and ardent temperance leader. Carry began
her temperance career in 1899 when she gathered WCTU women and stormed a saloon
in Medicine Lodge, KS on a quiet Sunday afternoon. She smashed up the saloon and went on to
smash others in town during the next few days.
Kansas was supposedly dry, and so all the saloons she was raiding
technically weren’t in existence. She moved to other Kansas towns, and then on
to other states and eventually her fame took her to England. On the steamship
taking her to England, she demolished the saloon onboard.
Carry must have
been a sight—six feet tall, weighing 180 pounds, she had a face like a bulldog
and a shrill voice, and false teeth. She was arrested over 25 times, was
attacked, pistol whipped and beaten, had her false teeth knocked down her
throat. Carry died in 1911 at age 64.
The object of
Carry’s life-long dream, and that of many others, prohibition, crept up on
America. When soldiers returned from World War I they found that half the
states had gone “dry” and in January 1919 the 18th Amendment was
passed. Accompanied by the Volstead Act
later that year, Prohibition began in the whole country in 1920. What a bad idea that turned out to be! Law-abiding people began to figure all kinds
of ways to break the law to drink, and it became the Golden Age for criminals.
Bootlegging was everywhere and moonshine production, adding all manner of often
poisonous substances to alcohol, went into high gear. The amendment was
repealed in December 1933, nearly 14 years after it became law.
World War II
was started by a teetotaler named Hitler. When Nazi troops overran France and
occupied it, they began confiscating French wine, 900,000 bottles a day, to
send back to the Reich. Stalin said that his generals did better when they were
drunk on vodka, and Russian troops were well supplied.
As the Soviet
Union edged toward capitalism, Premier Gorbachev sought to control widespread
drunkenness by tightening control over vodka sales. This helped end communism, and created a wild
distribution of samogon,
moonshine, high-alcohol-content with all kinds of other ingredients,
killing tens of thousands of Russians each year.
Next in Russia
came Boris Yeltsin, who stayed drunk much of the time, and the breakup of the
USSR. President Clinton said of him, “at least he’s not a mean drunk.”
Gately ends his
book with discussion of studies that state that some moderate drinking can
promote good health and longevity, as well as continuing efforts to limit or
eliminate drinking. He ends with: Salud,
kan pei, chin-chin, prost, yum sing, skål, slainte, a votre santé, na zdrowie, or
cheers!
S.W. Coulbourn
HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2020
Wednesday, August 26, 2020. China from 1900 to today. China has traveled a long way from the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901
when western nations felt free to wander all over the vast country. Sun-Yat-Sen
and the last Qing emperor…Military wardlordism ..Chiang Kai-Shek…War against
Japan… Mao Zedong and the Communist Revolution, founding of the People’s
Republic…”Great Leap Forward” and The Cultural Revolution…World’s No. 2
Economy, on the verge of becoming No. 1. [Proposed by Jason Shaw]
Spanish Flu Victim, St. Louis, 1918
Wednesday, September 30,
2020. History of Pandemics.
A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν, pan, "all"
and δῆμος, demos, "people") is an epidemic of an infectious
disease that has spread across a large
region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of people.
Throughout human history, there have been a number of pandemics of diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis. The most fatal pandemic in recorded history was the Black
Death (also known as The Plague), which killed an estimated 75–200 million people in the 14th
century. Other notable pandemics include the 1918
influenza pandemic (Spanish flu). Current
pandemics include COVID-19 and HIV/AIDs. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn].
Truman holds "fake" news in Chicago Tribune
Wednesday, October 28, 2020. Unique Elections in American
History. The forthcoming
election may seem the most unique, but this month we will look back at past
elections. Select any that you find interesting. For instance: Election of 1828: Andrew Jackson vs. John Quincy Adams; Election of 1840: William Henry Harrison vs. Martin Van Buren; Election of 1860: Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas vs. John C. Breckinridge vs.
John Bell; Election of 1864 : Abraham Lincoln vs. George B. McClellan; Election of 1884: Grover Cleveland vs. James G. Blaine; Election of 1912: Woodrow
Wilson vs. William Howard Taft vs. Theodore Roosevelt vs. Eugene V. Debs; Election of 1948: Harry Truman vs. Thomas E. Dewey vs. Strom Thurmond vs. Henry
Wallace. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]
Gloucester Dorymen
Wednesday, November 25,
2020. Gloucester and the
Sea.
Gloucester has
throughout four centuries cast its lot with the North Atlantic, remaining a
maritime port for better or worse. The maritime culture of Cape Ann is the mix
of a noble maritime heritage; ubiquitous sea influences that reach as far as
the quarries behind Rockport and into the haunted tracks of Dogtown Common;
seductive but capricious natural splendors; and untidy independence that repels
some but converts other visitors into lifetime devotees. Read any book about the
maritime history of Gloucester and Cape Ann.
[Suggested by Richard Verrengia]
There will be no meeting in December
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