Beer : Health and Nutrition

46 Chapter Two
It was Dr Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, who in
1784 penned An inquiry into the effects of spiritous liquors on the human mind and body,
and who argued that ‘ardent spirits’ caused inter alia obstruction of the liver, jaundice,
hoarseness, diabetes, jaundice, gout, epilepsy, madness and ‘frequent and disgusting
belchings’. There were plenty of people prepared to buy into his argument. And so a
group of Connecticut businessmen stopped making rum available to their employees,
replacing it with cider and beer. And in New York State in 1808 the Union Temperance
Society was founded. Beer was ‘in’, but the 44 members pledged to ‘use no rum, gin,
whisky, wine or any distilled spirits … except by the advice of a physician, or in case of
actual disease, also excepting wine at public dinners’. A number of other such societies
sprang up, arguing for moderation rather than abstinence. President Thomas Jefferson
wrote to a friend in 1815 about beer: ‘I wish to see this beverage become common
instead of the whiskey which kills one third of our citizens and ruins their families’. As
Divine et al. (1987) put it:
The temperance movement was directed at a real social evil, more serious in many
ways than the drug problems of today. Since the Revolution, whiskey had become
the most popular American beverage. Made from corn by individual farmers or,
by the 1820s, in commercial distilleries, it was cheaper than milk or beer and safer
than water (which was often contaminated).
Hard liquor was frequently consumed with food as a table beverage, even at
breakfast and children sometimes imbibed along with adults. Per capita annual
consumption of distilled spirits in the 1820s was almost triple what it is today,
and alcoholism had reached epidemic proportions.
A Presbyterian minister, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin), became a particularly vocal opponent of alcohol in all its manifestations. The
Reverend Lyman Beecher implored his congregation to join his crusade to rid the country
of ‘rum-selling, tippling folk, in dels and ruff-scruff’. His sermons were distributed
nation-wide, with the impact that employers stopped giving drinks to their workforce and
liquor rations ceased in the US Army. Beecher’s American Temperance Union (ATU)
sought to persuade every state to ban the production and sale of alcohol. At rst beer
was accepted within the ATU, but that too fell foul of the zealots in 1836. The impact
was a decline in membership. So many people realised the facts: it was hard spirits that
were leading too many astray, not beer.
The ght against alcohol became easier in 1833 when the US Supreme Court
ruled that state governments could regulate the liquor trade within their boundaries.
Furthermore it permitted ‘local option’, in which individual counties and towns could
introduce prohibition if they so wished. First off the blocks was Massachusetts in 1838,
with the banning of sales of spirits in quantities less than 15 gallons. It didn’t last long