ADDICTION

Addiction (chemical dependency) is caused by three substances: alcohol, narcotics, and tobacco (nicotine). In the period from 1870 to 1920, alcohol had a far greater impact on literary creativity than did narcotics or tobacco. The understanding of the nature of addiction—particularly addiction to alcohol—changed significantly from the Civil War period to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) to the Constitution in 1919. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, habitual drunkenness, for example, was judged, especially by temperance societies (which actually advocated abstinence or teetotalism) and by many Protestant clergy, to be a choice and a vice. The emerging opinion of many in the medical establishment and among liberal reformers, however, was that addiction to moodaltering substances was a treatable disease.

ALCOHOL

The three principal reform movements of the nineteenth century were abolition, woman suffrage, and temperance. The first reform was achieved by the Civil War, the latter two through constitutional amendments. These movements were linked by activists who were, in many instances, deeply involved in all three causes.

Whereas the moralists' uncompromising condemnation of habitual drunkenness largely prevailed in the popular literature of the nineteenth century, by the 1870s the medical (disease) model of the affliction began to gain a sympathetic audience. That alcoholism (a usage dating from 1849) was a treatable illness had a certain appeal not only for the medical establishment but also for public officials because the attempts to cure the inebriate by simply eliminating the availability of liquor were not working. In spite of efforts by temperance advocates to ban or even physically destroy the saloon (e.g., Carry Nation's "hatchetation"), the statistics of alcohol consumption from 1870 to 1919 remained relatively stable, between 1.72 and 2.60 U.S. gallons of absolute alcohol a year per capita of the drinking-age population (the high for America was 7.10 gallons in 1830; the low, 0.90 in 1920, the first year of Prohibition) (Rorabaugh, p. 232; Lender and Martin, pp. 205–206). Because a large part of the population (especially women) did not drink, however, the consumption of spirits by those who did was heavy indeed.

The belief in the nineteenth century that alcoholism could be cured or at least treated and arrested achieved practical application primarily through two methods: self-help groups and the inebriate asylum. Self-help organizations such as the Washingtonian Temperance Society, started in Baltimore in 1840, were followed by similar societies leading ultimately to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. Most of these groups consisted of meetings of drunkards who had taken a pledge to stop drinking. They supported their sobriety by confessing to each other stories about their drunken behavior. The asylum movement aimed to establish treatment centers that would replace the more expensive hospitals and insane asylums. The first such center was the New York State Inebriate Asylum in Binghamton, an institution that existed from 1864 to 1879. The self-help groups were more successful in helping alcoholics maintain sobriety than were the asylums, but in the nineteenth century neither lasted much past the original enthusiasm of their founders.

That African Americans had the strength to war against alcoholism and slavery at the same time is a testament to human endurance. A popular African American temperance pledge of the time was "Being mercifully redeemed from human slavery, we do pledge ourselves never to be brought into the slavery of the bottle" (Warner, p. 257). Frederick Douglass seemed at moments to be as concerned about the one as the other. Perhaps the most significant temperance novel of the period by an African American is Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story (1876–1877) by Frances E. W. Harper. Harper, like Douglass, devoted much of her long life to the abolition first of slavery and then of alcohol.

"Stories," says Edmund O'Reilly, in his analysis of recovery narratives, "may be the best means we have for comprehending alcoholism, since only stories can begin to contain alcoholism's bewildering, intractable, contradictory, protean nature" (Reynolds and Rosenthal, p. 180). This conclusion is supported by the fact that almost all the major—and many of the minor—American writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Jack London recognized the narrative power of drinking behavior and included the theme of alcohol abuse in their work. Drinking was the subject matter in poems and plays as well as in stories, but with the notable exceptions of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the quality seldom rises above doggerel or preaching.

Regional literature, particularly humorous tales, is another matter. The yarns and satires of the Old Southwest and the West, for instance, document the reality that boozing and fighting were simply facts of life. But the drunk—like the prostitute—was almost always a stereotype, there to make a joke, not to make the case for sobriety or chastity. Mark Twain is an exception. Twain in fact took temperance—by which he meant moderation—very seriously, but in his stories drunkenness, not drinking, is the problem. Another exception is Owen Wister, whose The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) depicts what was to become the classic western saloon scene: whiskey, cards, and guns. In a celebrated passage the Virginian, after Trampas the villain said, "Your bet, you son-of-a—," responded: "When you call me that, smile" (p. 23).

The theme of alcoholism as an often intractable problem that cannot be cured by willpower alone finds its most complex expression in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, and London. The long, rich career of Stowe (1811–1896) is a case in point. Nicholas O. Warner, in his analysis of drinking in Stowe's fiction, traces her characterization of drunkenness as a moral failing and a sin in her early work to her finally arriving at the conviction in the later work that uncontrolled drinking is a disease leading to the tragedy of alcoholism. By the time Stowe wrote about the alcoholic Bolton in My Wife and I (1871) and in We and Our Neighbors (1873), however, she had developed a character, sensitive if flawed, who is a victim of a compulsion beyond his will. Bolton desperately attempts to control his drinking but discovers that because of his nature this is impossible: fate displaces weakness, a situation his wife understands and accepts.

The philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) explored the subject of addiction in depth. In The Principles of Psychology (1890) he dealt with the pathological aspects of addiction, and in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) he treated the spiritual and mystical effects of the use of alcohol and drugs. The following is from Varieties.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. . . . The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), pp. 348–349.

If Stowe's depiction of the alcoholic Bolton leans toward the sentimental, this cannot be said of Howells (1837–1920), that master of realism who chronicled through his voluminous writings the complexities of middle-class life. As John W. Crowley points out, from Hicks in The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), Bartley Hubbard in A Modern Instance (1882), and Berthold Lindau in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) to Alan Lynde in The Landlord at Lion's Head(1897), alcoholism is (variously) characterized as moral decay or a disease of the will. The vulnerable individual is driven to drink by the vicissitudes and disorders of modern life. Howells takes a hard look at drunken behavior, but for all that he delineates his characters' failings with more nuance and understanding than Stowe. In the final analysis both authors combine the moral model of addiction with the medical model. They both knew that each model by itself would result merely in stock figures: the unredeemable, the wretch, the clown, the hopeless victim—in short, in types of little literary or moral seriousness.

Stowe's and Howells's worlds are those of the middle and upper-middle class: immoderate drinking and drunkenness were not to be displayed in public, embarrassment was privatized, and tragedy was familial. This was not the world of Crane, London, and Wister, a world in which the tavern and the saloon displayed public drinking at its worst and best. The saloon of the time could be the friendly tavern seen in Crane's (1871–1900) George's Mother ("a little glass-fronted saloon that blinked jovially at the crowds" [p. 216]), and then again it was described as an elegant or even a palatial establishment. Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), in Sister Carrie (1900), describes Hurstwood's "resort," Fitzgerald and Moy's, as "a gorgeous saloon . . . ornamented with a blaze of incandescent lights, held in handsome chandeliers. . . . The long bar was a blaze of lights, polished wood-work and cut glassware, and many fancy bottles. It was a truly swell saloon" (p. 41). This was preeminently a man's world, the conviviality unconcealed.

Crane's grim view of drinking is illustrated in Maggie, A Girl of the Streets: A Story of New York (1893) and in George's Mother (1896). In Maggie he tells the story of the corruption of a naive woman by Pete, a bartender who presides over a saloon and who in the end becomes its best customer, arriving "at that stage of drunkenness where affection is felt for the universe" (p. 73). Crane's most powerful study of drinking, however, is George's Mother (1896). Crane's father, the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane, author of The Arts of Intoxication (1870), and his mother were both well-known temperance workers, and Crane makes good use of this background in his novella. A famous print of the time, The Drunkard's Progress (1846), describes the nine steps of the downfall of the alcoholic from "a glass with a friend" through "a confirmed drunkard" to the last step, "death by suicide" (Monteiro, pp. 48–49). As George Monteiro argues, the nine stages roughly correspond to the rise and fall of George Kelcey, the alcoholic son in George's Mother. The stark realism of the destructive bickering between an evangelical mother and her aimless, boozing son here is as painful to observe as is the witnessing of a pathologist's dissection. In his chilling story George's Mother, Crane creates a world where life seems scarcely worth living.

John Barleycorn (1913), London's (1876–1916) "alcoholic reminiscences," is in the tradition of addiction memoirs beginning with Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). London's memoir is perhaps the most powerful and the most important literary work about addiction published in this period. It is also a curious narrative that is almost perfectly ambivalent. London attempts to explain his temptation to drink and at the same time to warn his readers against the persuasions of John Barleycorn. Furthermore, he states that he supports both Prohibition and woman suffrage, the latter because women are far more likely to vote for the Prohibition Amendment than are men and must therefore be enfranchised. These declarations, though a minor part of the book, had much to do with making it a best-seller, as reformers sent copies of it to their huge membership.

The odd characteristic of John Barleycorn is that throughout his memoir London claims that he is not an alcoholic, yet his descriptions of his drinking, from his getting drunk at the age of five to his conclusion that "I survived . . . because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac" (p. 1107) reveal what clinicians would define as chronic physical alcohol dependence and denial of that dependence. London believed that he drank because he craved male companionship even though he detested the taste of liquor and did not especially care for the way it made him feel. Yet because he craved friendship he drank and drank—and drank. And he did so because his alter egos John Barleycorn and the White Logic compelled him. The former is the "friend" that leads him to drink in spite of himself, the latter the "philosopher" that rationalizes temptation. What distinguishes London's account from temperance novels and makes it such a powerful, sustained confession is his modern psychological insight and social awareness.

It is this modernity that signaled the fundamental change in the medical, the literary, and finally the public perception of the nature of alcoholic addiction. This change—that the substance was not so much the problem as was the abuse of it—eroded the moral power of the temperance movement: no longer could the inebriate be portrayed simply as weak and contemptible. In short, from Stowe to London's John Barleycorn the sympathetic ministrations of the psychologist began gradually to displace the puritanical thunder of Jeremiah.

NARCOTICS

Narcotics—opiates (opium, morphine, heroin, codeine, laudanum), cannabis (hemp, hashish, marijuana), and cocaine—were in widespread use in nineteenth-century America. Indeed, opium in one form or another was popular among all classes in Western society at least from the seventeenth century. David Musto, in his study of narcotics in America, points out that a rapid rise in the importation of raw opium and its derivative morphine began in the 1870s. Opiates were widely prescribed by physicians and were also included in many patent medicines. "The unregulated patent medicine craze in the United States hit its peak in the late nineteenth-century—a time when the opiate content of these medicines was probably also at its highest" (Musto, p. 3). A glance at the Sears Roebuck catalog for 1897 explains in part why. It offered laudanum, among other nostrums ("Directions on each bottle for old and young") at $3 for a dozen four-ounce bottles ("our goods go into every city, town and hamlet in every state").

There is some dispute regarding the extent of drug addiction in America at the turn of the century, but it appears that it peaked in 1900 at about 250,000 addicts. The Chinese were often blamed for the problem, yet it was in fact found among all groups—not least among women. Crane begins his "Opium's Varied Dreams," an 1896 article he published in the New York Sun, "Opium smoking in this country is believed to be more particularly a pastime of the Chinese, but in truth the greater number of the smokers are white men and white women," and he claimed that there were "25,000 opium-smokers in the city of New York alone" (p. 853). The increasingly widespread use of narcotics led to a series of reforms, beginning with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Harrison Act of 1914. The latter was designed not to prohibit the sale of drugs but to control them—a major difference from the attacks on alcohol—since opiates in particular had legitimate medical uses.

A word is needed about absinthe, a blend of 72 percent alcohol and herbals, including wormwood. Called La Fée Verte or the Green Fairy by nineteenth-century French artists, absinthe allegedly caused hallucinations, convulsions, and "brain-rot" (absinthism), though London, for one, was not impressed. "The trouble with [absinthe]," he writes in John Barleycorn, "was that I had to take such inordinate quantities in order to feel the slightest effect" (p. 1083). The drink gained a mythical status among the avant-garde: as with opium earlier, absinthe was thought to enhance the artistic imagination, and French artists and poets in particular consumed large quantities of it. Absinthe's perceived dangers, however, led to its banning in America in 1912 and in France in 1915. Though it frequently appeared in works of the European fin de siècle, it had little literary influence in America.

The drug that appears most prominently in the literature of this time is morphine, in large part because of its consumption by middle- and upper-class respectable women as an analgesic and as a treatment for neurasthenia, a popular affliction characterized by neurotic symptoms of fatigue and ennui. Just as the sensitive, world-weary male had his alcoholism, so the female had her morphinism, though the latter addiction was much easier to conceal than the former.

Although the use of drugs in America by the general population was at the time widespread, it had not yet significantly entered the literary or artistic imagination. London mentions his "adventures" in "Hasheesh Land" in John Barleycorn (p. 1092), but as with absinthe, narcotics for him were not part of the White Logic. The tales of Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Sax Rohmerinvolving opium and cocaine were widely read, but not until Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) do narcotics become a major subject for serious American writers.

TOBACCO

Drouet, in Sister Carrie, enjoyed dining at Rector's, where, amid a profusion of lights and in the company of actors and professional people, he had a splendid meal followed by liquor and a cigar. The experience would not have been complete without the cigar, and one is reminded that smoking has more than nicotine to recommend it. Nicotine, a stimulant like cocaine, is the addictive substance in tobacco, but the act of smoking is also habituating. This psychological-aesthetic experience, when integrated with the chemical substance, forms a powerful double hold on the user.

The population of the United States doubled between 1880 and 1910, and tobacco availability in all forms grew accordingly. Snuff and especially chewing tobacco were popular, and the spittoon (more elegantly, the cuspidor) was a fixture in most public buildings. Pipes, often beautifully designed, were marketed along with an array of tools for cigar smokers. Added to these attractions was the fact that tobacco products were remarkably cheap (cigarettes, for example, sold in 1876 for ninety-six cents per one thousand). The almost universal use of tobacco drew the critical attention of two powerful reformers, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (calling it "demon weed") and Theodore Roosevelt's trustbusters. The net result was that broken up, the tobacco companies became increasingly competitive largely by vastly expanding their advertising—as a child Jack London collected cigarette-card advertisements—and consumption accelerated.

Also, tobacco was thought to be a necessity. No less an authority than General John J. Pershing, the American commander in World War I, demanded tobacco for his troops, arguing that cigarettes were more necessary for them than food.

One notable genre where literature and tobacco merged was the verse anthology. These collections, filled with praise of the "divine weed," characterized the pipe in particular as a valued—and sometimes the only—friend. A representative volume is Joseph Knight's compilation Pipe and Pouch: The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry (1894), which went through many printings, including a leather-bound edition with its own pouch. The poems are the kind that would appeal more to J. Alfred Prufrock than to Prince Hamlet: sentimental, comforting, at times therapeutic. A verse letter by James Russell Lowell is included, thanking Charles Eliot Norton for a box of cigars ("Tobacco, sacred herb . . . Baffles old Time . . . And makes him turn his hourglass slowly" [p. 34]). Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whose first published work was a volume of temperance poems, contributed:

I like cigars

Beneath the stars,

Upon the waters blue.

To laugh and float

While rocks the boat

Upon the waves,—Don't you?

(P. 121)

In addition, the imagist poet Amy Lowell made a practice of smoking cigars in public.

Tobacco, then, as an addiction, a habit, and a pleasure was accepted by many—by men and increasingly by women—as a fact of life. Its health problems were by no means unknown, but such concerns at this time were defeated by the glamour and seduction that were beginning to come into play in advertising, popular songs, and film.

CONCLUSION

In the initial year of Prohibition, two novels were published that signified that social change was on the way: Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920). The revolt against the village and the rejection of social proprieties were modernist departures from the literary tradition that drew to a close as the First World War began. Both authors were enormously popular and much admired—and alcoholic. How relevant alcoholism was to their art is problematic, but an aspect of their celebrity was the defiance of decorum by their publicly drunken behavior that fifty years earlier would have doomed their careers as later it did their lives.

Chemical dependency or altered states of consciousness, those morally neutral terms that replaced the old, prescriptive labels for addiction, were becoming existential conditions for which a cure was not necessarily desired and of which the altered state was the reality consciously sought. It is profoundly ironic that at that moment when modernism announced the new sensibility, Prohibition went into effect.

See alsoHealth and Medicine; Reform; Temperance

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Crane, Stephen. Prose and Poetry. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Crowley, John W., ed. Drunkard's Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair, and Recovery. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie; Jennie Gerhardt; Twelve Men. New York: Library of America, 1987.

Knight, Joseph, ed. Pipe and Pouch: The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry. Boston: H. M. Caldwell, 1894.

London, Jack. Novels and Social Writings. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Wister, Owen. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. 1902. Edited by Philip Durham. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Secondary Works

Conrad, Barnaby, III. Absinthe: History in a Bottle. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1988.

Courtwright, David T. Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Crowley, John W. The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in Modernist Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Crowley, John W., and William L. White. Drunkard's Refuge: The Lessons of the New York State Inebriate Asylum. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.

Gilman, Sander L., and Zhou Xun, eds. Smoke: A Global History of Smoking. London: Reaktion, 2004.

Klein, Richard. Cigarettes Are Sublime. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Lender, Mark Edward, and James Kirby Martin. Drinking in America: A History. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Free Press, 1987.

McCrady, Barbara S., and Elizabeth E. Epstein, eds. Addictions: A Comprehensive Guidebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Monteiro, George. Stephen Crane's Blue Badge of Courage. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Musto, David F. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. Expanded ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

O'Reilly, Edmund B. Sobering Tales: Narratives of Alcoholism and Recovery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Reynolds, David S., and Debra J. Rosenthal, eds. The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Roth, Marty. Drunk the Night Before: An Anatomy of Intoxication. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Vaillant, George E. The Natural History of Alcoholism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Warner, Nicholas O. Spirits in America: Intoxication in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

Roger Forseth