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A Sober Historian Chronicles America’s Drunk History

The Fix Q&A with Christopher M. Finan, author of Drunks: An American History, on our nation's history of alcoholism, recovery and AA.

An interview about the author's own recovery and how it inspired him to write this book about the history of alcoholism.

The origin story of America is typically told as a fight for freedom. But a new book, Drunks: An American History, by Christopher M. Finan, recounts a struggle that predates our wrestle for independence: a three century long battle to sober up.

Drunks begins in 1799 with the story of Handsome Lake, a member of the Seneca Nation whose drinking reduced him to “yellow skin and dried bones.” Stripped of their land and decimated by poverty, Natives sought solace in yet another empty gift offered by Americans: booze.

In a weakened, depressed state, Handsome Lake had a vision in which the Creator told him that alcohol was for the white man. “No, the Creator did not make it for you.” Inspired by his spiritual awakening, Handsome Lake eventually went on to help his fellow Iroquois sober up in what turned out to be one of the first bona fide recovery movements in North America.

Finan also chronicles the evolution of temperance movements that ultimately led to America’s failed flirtation with prohibition. The history is full of passionate characters, like Carry Nation, the radical prohibitionist known for wielding a hatchet used to break saloon windows. You’ll discover a whole other reason to dig Abraham Lincoln. While stigma punished alcoholics, he had something of a soft spot. “There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant, and the warm-blooded, to fall into this vice,” he says fondly of local drunkards.

A theme of warmth and empathy toward those who’ve walked through the gauntlet of alcoholism is carefully threaded throughout Drunks. Probably because Finan himself comes from a long line of people who drank too much. He, his mom and his dad all came down with alcoholism. But the interview below, which was lightly edited for length and clarity, shows Finan as an optimist. Reading his book, you’ll understand why. While many of us are still drunk and will stay drunk, history shows we’ve come a long way from gold cures and cruel sanatoriums. Drunks is a history of lost causes finding redemption.

Your book is chock-full of fascinating historical nuggets about alcohol’s place in America’s political and social history. Which person or story that you dug up stands out as a favorite? 

The story of Handsome Lake. He’s the Seneca leader of the first recovery movement. Partly because it's such a heartbreaking story, of how hard alcoholism hit the Indians. They were experiencing nightmare after nightmare: military defeat, dispossession, poverty and alcoholism. But his religious awakening, founded on sobriety, is so encouraging. He was very successful in sobering up other members of the Iroquois Confederacy. Of course he didn't sober up everybody but the Indians had no idea that recovery was even possible until Handsome Lake began his crusade. One of my favorite quotes is from an unidentified member of his tribe. Someone asked why did it take you guys so long to get sober. He responded, "Until Handsome lake. our prophet, said the great ruler wants us to get sober, we didn't have the power. But now we know it's possible." In many ways that is every alcoholics' experience. When we’re trending down to the bottom, we wonder: is there anything we can do to stop this? Those people become powers of example to us; that’s what Handsome Lake was to his people. He was proof that not only you can get sober but that your welfare and happiness depended on it.

“Drunks” is an exhaustive history. And addiction and alcoholism are deeply personal, complex topics to explore. What motivated you to research this history?

I studied history in grad school and toward the end of my dissertation, I told my advisor I was in recovery. I had known him quite a long time and I don’t know why I decided to tell him but I did. He was a very warm and gracious guy. He became very excited and told me I ought to write a history of alcoholism. He said it would gain from the fact that you’re sober and provide some of that perspective that another historian might not be able to do.

I really liked the idea, but my dissertation took a very long time. That book took even longer. Then I wrote my second book as a history of free speech. When that was done, and I began to think about this book,I only knew my own experience in recovery. But when I looked at the broader picture I found that this was an untold story. There are certainly many historians of recovery and I depended heavily on their work, particularly William White. But there wasn’t a compact version of this story.

The more I researched the more I realized that I identified with these people. When I researched the Indians and read them describe their first experience with inebriation, I thought wow I felt that. I got that excitement, that thrill. It was like reading something that had been written yesterday instead of three centuries ago. I got very excited about these people.

Storytelling is a big part of AA and recovery today in general. But it also played a powerful role in early temperance movements. Why do you think drunks telling their stories or drunks hearing others' stories is important?

One of the other people I found particularly fascinating was this unemployed hatter named John Hawkins. He goes onto become the leading orator for the Washingtonians. I heard about the group before; but doing research you just caught their enthusiasm. It was the same discovery the Iroquois had made: nobody thought alcoholics could be restored to sobriety. Everyone thought we were a lost cause. So the best we could do was ban the sale of alcohol and all the alcoholics would die off and it’d be a better world.

To some extent, the storytelling aspect is built on a Protestant tradition of witnessing faith in Christ publicly, speaking about how your life had been improved by religious experience. But what was so different about the Washingtonians was that there was no particular religious angle to those stories. They were getting up and talking about their stories as drunks and not Christians. It was a central feature of the Washingtonian movement and a big factor in its popularity. Not only among alcoholics, but among the public. It was a huge social phenomenon. Everyone was talking about these Washingtonians during the 1840s. It swept the nation.

There was a certain amount of interest by people who weren’t alcoholics. They were open to anybody and most Washingtonians were not drunks but the leaders were. So these stories of degradation had a certain appeal. But the real appeal was the discovery that recovery was possible. My favorite spokesman for that in the book is Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln has no use for the old temperance ministers with their indifference to alcoholics. He recognizes that this is this a great human reclamation project. And he gives it his blessing.

A lot of our readers are in recovery from alcoholism. They probably know the story behind Alcoholics Anonymous: when Bill met Bob. But can you give us the historical context of their meeting?

This was one of the most hopeless periods for alcoholics in American history. What we saw in the 19th century was a growing effort to help alcoholics. Even after the Washingtonians faded, they inspired others to begin to open institutions to help people get and stay sober -- they believed in the possibility of recovery.

All that gets wiped by Prohibition. All those institutions close because there’s this naive belief that once there is no alcohol there will not be any alcoholics. Some alcoholics even believed that; even Dr. Bob believed that and thought prohibition was a solution to his problems. Everyone who felt that way was cruelly disappointed.

Within a couple years there was as much booze as ever. By the 1930s, there was little to no help available for alcoholics. So when Bill and Bob meet they are really starting at ground zero. For the first time, until 1935 to 1941, they’re really struggling. They’re broke. They’re getting people sober and it keeps them going but AA isn’t growing very rapidly.

But once AA gets public attention then begins an explosive growth in Cleveland and eventually to rest of country. It becomes the main pathway to recovery. In addition to being of direct service to the people in the rooms, it supports a more humanitarian approach. Once again, American people see alcoholics can get sober and stay that way. It encourages more efforts to help them and causes more understanding in the private sector about alcoholic employees, which eventually results in direct government support for recovery institutions.

The significance of AA, historically, is impossible to overstate. It makes possible so much of what we benefit from today. Of course, recovery is much bigger than AA; but it really did make subsequent efforts possible.

As a journalist I’ve covered the addiction treatment industry, which today is rife with hucksters, gurus and snake oil salesmen. I thought of all that when I came across Dr. Leslie Keeley peddling his “Gold Cure”? He seems complicated, because it sounds like he was really trying to help people but peddling a bogus tonic.

I agree with you it’s very hard to know what he was thinking in the beginning. He was inspired as a medical man. Like others before him [such as] Dr. Benjamin Rush, he believed a cure was possible. Keeley comes up with the Gold Cure, but certainly in the beginning there's a certain amount of hucksterism.

His unwillingness to ever reveal what the Gold Cure is certainly confirms our suspicion.

But what mattered to Keeley was not the Gold Cure. What mattered was his faith in recovery, and the fact that he inspired others to believe in it and come to his clinics. There were over 100 clinics in the country during the peak of Keeleyism. What got people sober was not the Gold Cure, but being with other alcoholics and discovering that you weren't alone and the failures you experienced have been experienced by many other people.

So you’re saying it wasn't the gold chloride that helped people.

It wasn’t gold chloride, it was other alcoholics. The secret is what we’ve seen in the Washingtonians and even among the Seneca. It was believing that sobriety was possible and having the support of others.

Alcohol kills more people than heroin but it doesn’t get much media play these days. Are we focusing too much on opioids and forgetting that there isn’t just an opioid epidemic but an epidemic of addiction?

Drug addiction and alcoholism used to be treated very differently. This brings in some class and racial elements. They were treated as different things. There was a time when people in AA were very worried about the program being diverted for people who were dually addicted. The fear was once again that the focus on recovery would get lost. As science tells [us] more about addiction, it really has made it plain that many of the basic processes in biological addiction are common across substances. I think that increasingly, the advocacy done on behalf of alcoholics and addicts is done on that basic premise. 

Faces and Voices of Recovery, which emerges as the primary vehicle for advocacy in the early 21st century, their central thesis is that addiction is addiction. Both alcoholics and drug users gain from that conception because it just demonstrates how broad the problem is, how serious it is and also how many of the solutions we've devised over the years for dealing with alcoholism can also be useful for people with other kinds of drug addictions. I don't think it steals any thunder from alcoholics to recognize that people with opioid addictions are in a terrible crisis. It just confirms that, for everyone, addiction is a deadly and serious matter. And that people need help and benefit from help.

In terms of advocacy, do you think stigma is on the decline?

There’s a broader understanding now, more than at any time in our history, that addiction is an illness and has to be treated. I was watching the news last night about some stupid sheriff in Butler County Ohio. He won’t authorize his deputies to carry naloxone. I think that guy is only interesting because of all the other cops you see being interviewed saying it’s better to have something than nothing—we need solutions. I think stigma has declined significantly. One reason is a lot of of people in media reporting those stories may not be in recovery themselves, but they know people who are. There are so many people in recovery now it’s changing the minds of mainstream.

I think social media today plays a huge role in reducing stigma. People aren’t anonymous anymore, they’re very loud and out there.

I’ve been been sober a long time but I knew nothing about Faces and Voices of Recovery until I started doing research for that last chapter. I found it tremendously exciting. Their own polling shows people in recovery are increasingly willing to talk about their own histories. That’s a huge significant historical development. It’s not just a matter of politics. When people realize that recovery is as broad as a huge movement as it is, it will only encourage more people to get help and continue to break down stigma.

 

By Zachary Siegel 07/18/17

The New York Times: Alcoholism in America

“The fight against addiction is one of America’s great liberation movements,” Christopher M. Finan writes in his introduction to “Drunks: An American History.” Like other such fights, it is “marked by periods of progress and devastating reverses.”

Temperance movements grew throughout the 19th century, leading to states banning alcohol and, finally, the national prohibition law that took effect in 1920. The law coincided with a withdrawal of government support from many institutions, like the Minnesota Hospital Farm for Inebriates, that were meant to help. Banning alcohol, it was hoped, would do the trick.

In the early 20th century, Henry F. Milans, an alcoholic ex-journalist, had heard a doctor tell medical students of his condition: “This man can never be cured! He must die as he has lived, a drunkard. Nothing can save him.” Finan writes that Milans very likely joined the United Order of Ex-Boozers, a group of mutually supportive alcoholics organized by the Salvation Army. It was a precursor of sorts to Alcoholics Anonymous, the creation of which is detailed in “Drunks,” including the organization’s early wrestling with how explicitly religious it should be. One of its 12 steps originally stated that “God could restore us to our sanity.” God was revised to a “Power greater than ourselves.”

Finan’s chapter on A.A. brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s treatment of the group’s tenets in “Infinite Jest.” “And that was the first night that cynical Gately willingly took the basic suggestion,” Wallace wrote, “to get down on his big knees by his undersized spring-shot Ennet House bunk and Ask For Help from something he still didn’t believe in, ask for his own sick Spider-bit will to be taken from him and fumigated and squished.”

Quotable

“I’ll be in the supermarket pushing the baby around, and people will sidle up and want a selfie. Which I never mind. Weirder is when you catch people taking selfies with you in the background. Wish you’d just come over and say hello.” — Neil Gaiman, in an interview with Houston Press

The Year of Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born 200 years ago this month, and publishers are celebrating with new editions and adaptations of his work. “The Illustrated Walden” recreates a 1902 edition that included 30 engravings, daguerreotypes and period photographs. “A Year in the Woods,” a picture book illustrated by Giovanni Manna, selects excerpts from “Walden” for a condensed view of Thoreau’s time in the woods. And Jeffrey S. Cramer has edited and annotated “Essays,” a selection of Thoreau’s writings about slavery, Massachusetts, apples and other subjects. In this issue, the historian Douglas Brinkley considers Thoreau’s environmental legacy beyond the shores of Walden Pond.

By JOHN WILLIAMS

VICE: America Has Been Trying to Get Sober for Over 300 Years

The new book 'Drunks' is a colorful history of America's attempts to lay off the sauce, from radical prohibitionists attacking frontier bars to modern rehab programs like AA.

For as long as people have been drinking, they've also been trying to quit. A new book, Drunks: An American History, by Christopher M. Finan, chronicles the various sobriety movements that have characterized every phase of American history, as far back as the 17th century.

Drunks, which was published last week by Beacon Press, begins with Native Americans, for whom sobriety was not just a personal health issue but a way to restore pride and independence from the white colonists who first brought liquor to the continent. Finan recounts the story of Handsome Lake, a member of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), whose visions of a spirit messenger telling him to abstain from alcohol, kicked off a religious sobriety movement in 1799. (Legally speaking, Finan notes that the very first North American prohibition was enacted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633.) From there, the book covers centuries of colorful episodes, including radical prohibitionist Carry Nation's attacks against frontier taverns in the early 1900s. She smashed up Kansas bars "first with bricks and stones, then an iron rod, and finally a seven-pound hatchet" taken from the railroad company. These early sobriety movements would eventually pave the way for the self-help and rehabilitation movements of the 1980s, including Betty Ford's highly publicized rehab center. The Betty Ford Clinic was so fascinating to people, a TV station once attempted to sneak into her hospital via a bread truck. "I hadn't rescued anyone from a burning building," said Ford, mystified by all the attention. "I'd simply put my bottles down."

But Finan, who comes from generations of alcoholics working to get sober, knows there's nothing simple about it. This lived-in experience is on display as he chronicles three centuries of advocates and alcoholics fighting to arrive at the modern view of addiction. Drunks shows how hard doctors have had to work to prove that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease and that giving up alcohol was possible for even habitual drinkers. Finan calls sobriety one of the "great liberation movements," and his book is a history of people trying to get free.

VICE: You write about the changing meaning of "temperance." How and why did the meaning of that term change over time?
Christopher M. Finan: In the beginning, there was a widespread recognition that Americans had a drinking problem, by the end of the 18th century. It was the result of the sudden flood of whiskey that became so cheap that abuse was inevitable. So the early temperance groups advocating abstaining from distilled spirits but believed it was OK to drink beer and wine. In fact, Dr. Benjamin Rush [surgeon general of the Continental Army] really believed that lesser spirits could help people get sober by helping to wean them off of whiskey. As the temperance movement grew, people started to say—sensibly—it's not really whiskey that's the problem, alcohol is the problem. So, several decades into the movement, this clash developed between the older school of temperance and the so-called Tea-Totalers, who began to push a pledge getting people to abstain from any alcohol at all. And that became the stance of the temperance movement up until Prohibition.

There is a theme of class that comes up from time to time in the book. Do you see a connection between the issue of drunkenness and the American dream of economic success? 
As with every aspect of American history, there certainly is a class element. Some of the older temperance supporters were ministers and men of wealth who really wanted to be able to continue to drink wine. So focusing on whiskey, which is what the poor were drinking, was easy for them. For the Washingtonians, the 19th-century movement among working men to address the problem of drunkenness in their ranks, it definitely was a factor. [It was] an increasingly turbulent economic environment, in which classes were developing—and sobriety was critical to be able to rise in that world.

I love the Abraham Lincoln quotation that you include about the "heads and hearts of habitual drunkards." It's a warm description—very different from the way that many others talk about drunks. 
It is a constant theme, to push back against the image of them as the town drunks, the degenerates, and to make the point that alcoholism affects all classes of society and it afflicts the best and brightest. It's often a reaction to how terrible the stigma was against alcoholics: the idea that alcoholics deserved to suffer because they were bad people, they were criminals, they were weaklings, they were sinners. The tremendous humanitarianism of Lincoln is well-known, but I hadn't known until I started working on this book that it extended to drunks.

I was surprised to read how early some doctors were viewing alcohol abuse as a medical issue. 
They didn't call it alcoholism at the time, but alcohol has always been kicking the hell out of us. Doctors could hardly miss it. But it wasn't until the 18th century that some began to speculate that it was the consequence of a physical illness that could be studied. Benjamin Rush was the first American to focus on the problem and to see it as something that could be cured. He knew people who had gotten sober, and he had helped people get sober. He had a servant, who may have been a slave, who had an alcohol problem, and he gave him Ipecac to make him throw up, and that became a fairly standard treatment for helping to wean people off.

How did sobriety evolve from there?
Doctors had always been interested, but it was really until the 1870s that there were enough who came together for the American Associate for the Care of Inebriates. They began to establish institutions for alcoholics, and realized that as difficult as it was, people could be helped. And then that went on to Dr. Keeley, who established more than 100 clinics, and helped thousands.

Could you talk more about Keeley? This doctor is treating alcoholism as a disease—great—but also selling "gold injections" as a cure.
It takes a lot of thinking to figure out if he was a bad guy or a good guy. At the beginning, there was a certain amount of hucksterism. But the fact is that, whether he knew what he was doing or not, he did help thousands, because he created these places where alcoholics could go. They had been alone in their suffering, and they began to draw strength from each other, and gain confidence in the idea that they could recover. Up until that point, it wasn't even clear to people that recovery was possible.

"They didn't call it alcoholism at the time, but alcohol has always been kicking the hell out of us."

I love this idea that Keeley maybe was being a bit of huckster, but stumbled into the real cure.
I think he was well-intentioned. But as with all elements of American life, there was always an element of commerce. The patients in his clinics were enormously grateful to him. There's a scene with an image that I love. Keeley is under attack from the medical establishment and he's coming back from a trip, and there lined up at the railroad station are long lines of his patients who doff their caps to him as he passes—it's very heartwarming.

You get into the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Can you tell us a bit about what was going on in America at the time?
It's impossible to exaggerate what a disaster Prohibition was for alcoholics, even those who hoped that Prohibition would help them. There had been a little over a century of increasingly hopeful developments, and then Prohibition comes along and a lot of private institutions and some key government-run institutions closed. And when Prohibition fails, and the liquor starts to flow again, alcoholics are really lost. It is out of that really devastated landscape that Alcoholics Anonymous emerges. There were a lot of factors—like America's talent for forming voluntary groups, which is something that de Tocqueville talked about. But the spark is just this chance meeting between Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, in Akron, [Ohio], in 1935—two talented people, likeminded people, who find each other in desperation. Wilson is only a few months sober, and he's afraid he's going to get drunk, and Smith is recovering from a hangover from a couple of days before. These two guys sit down and click. By the early 1950s, there are more than 100,000 members. It is a fabulous tale—and its lasting significance cannot be overstated. This is one of America's great liberation movements.

I'm curious about what you think about the current culture around drinking and sobriety.
I think that a lot of the progress we've made is permanent. As long as people are staying sober and can remember what it was like for them, whether in AA or some other sobriety group, this is one of the defining experiences of their lives and they aren't about to let anybody deny or diminish the truth of what they've experienced. [But] alcoholism is still a tremendous problem, and the amount of treatment is completely inadequate. In government, there's always going to be the temptation to do what it did before with Prohibition, to cut back on spending, to say it's really not such a big problem. We hear that in the debate over repealing Obamacare. Tom Price, the head of Health and Human Services, was trying to defend the fact that the Republican plan would cut back on addiction services, and he said, "Hey, these treatments aren't working. We need to try something else." As if cutting the budget is the way to try something new.

By RACHEL RIEDERER