Tom Cizauskas' Twelve Books of Christmas

One of the few blogs I check regularly (no, I'm not a snob; I'm just busy to the point of being overwhelmed) is Yours for Good Fermentables, owned and operated by Tom Cizauskas.

I've been enjoying the heck out of a series he's running right now: "Twelve Books of Christmas," a collection of books he recommends for gift-giving. Unlike most lists, his is annotated, and that alone makes it worth a trip to his blog. You can see the entries so far here.

Anyway --- damn! I made the list. For that honor --- and I do consider it an honor --- I thank him. So if you're still wondering what to get for people on your list, head on over to Tom's blog and pick up some ideas.

First Draft Follies: The "Women's Crusade" of the 1870s, Part Three of Three

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series at the blog. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. When the material is lengthy, I break it into several parts; this is part three of three.

The setting here is the early 1870s, when the American temperance movement, which had been derailed by the Civil War, regrouped and renewed its efforts to eliminate alcohol in the United States.

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Had the women’s crusade been an isolated incident, brewers might have dismissed it as the work of cranks. But the sidewalk prayer meetings represented just one grasping tentacle of a newly revived, many-limbed temperance and prohibition movement. Hundreds of thousands of warriors banded together in the National Temperance Society or the Independent Order of Good Templars (which welcomed women).

In 1872, the Prohibition Party nominated one James Black for president. (Of the more than six million votes cast in that election, he amassed a grand total of 5,608.)

Social pillars launched campaigns against the “concert saloons,” divey joints that featured “waiter girls” who allegedly served drinks in the front rooms and sex in the back. In New York and Chicago, state legislators passed and police enforced Sunday closing laws.

In Hamilton County, Iowa, eight women sued eight saloonkeepers, charging the tapsters had led the women’s husbands down the road to inebriety. In Wisconsin, sponsors of county agricultural fairs banned beer, wine, and liquor from their events.

“On every hand, in every state,” complained the editor of Western Brewer, the nation’s newest brewing trade journal, “these communists are actively at work.” (*1)

The St. Louis Whiskey Ring scandal inflamed prohibitionists’ passions. Over a period of about three years in the early seventies, the ring’s members systematically defrauded the federal government of liquor taxes. Its network of members, spies, and agents stretched from distilleries in St. Louis to the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and from there to the White House, where the ring’s mastermind served as personal secretary to President Ulysses S. Grant.

Brewers, who played no part in the scandal, denounced the distillers and distanced themselves from the appalling facts of the case. In the minds of temperance enthusiasts, however, the slimey scandal provided proof that “Rum Power” still haunted the land and so steeled the resolve of crusading women and pro-temperance politicians.

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*1: “Progress of the Puritan’s War,” Western Brewer 2 (February 1877): 42).

2009 Yule Photo Contest Winners

Over at A Good Beer Blog, Alan McLeod has rolled out the winners of this year's photo contest. The "grand prize" winner (and, ahem, loser) are here. The other winners are here and here and here. Round of applause and a cup o' cheer, please, for Alan, who gets nothing out of this except the pleasure of sharing the photos with all of us.

First Draft Follies: The "Women's Crusade" of the 1870s, Part Two

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. The material here is presented "as is" from the first draft of the book that became Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. When the material is lengthy, I break it into several parts; this is part two of three. The setting here is the early 1870s, when the American temperance movement, which had been derailed by the Civil War, regrouped and renewed its efforts to eliminate alcohol in the United States.

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And so it went in another nine hundred towns in thirty-one (out of thirty-seven) states and the District of Columbia. The tens of thousands of marchers met with but limited success and may have done the cause more harm than good: most men were hostile, and many of the women played to type, thereby reinforcing the common view among men idea that a woman’s place was in the home. “It is easy enough to conquer a man, if only you know how,” one crusader explained.

I wish you could see me talking to some of these saloon men that I would never have spoken to before; I employ my sweetest accents; . . . I look into their eyes and grow pathetic; I shed tears, and I joke with them--but all in terrible earnest. And they surrender. (*1)

The hypocrisy left a bad taste in the mouth of an Ohio man.

“It is a little amusing,” he commented, “to hear one of these women talk to ‘their man’ as they have him cornered behind his bar, and to see how he takes to talk of that sort.”

He listened to one crusader as she “opened out her battery of words,” telling the proprietor that she “loved” him and “always had.”

“I’ll venture a treat,” the man scoffed, “that this same woman never thought of this poor devil of a saloon-keeper before, and if she had met him on the street . . . she would not have spoken to him.” (*2)

Still, there was no doubt that the crusaders placed themselves in real danger. In some communities minor riots erupted and mobs attacked the women. At a march in Pittsburgh, hecklers jeered and threw rocks, paint, eggs, bricks, and beer at the women. One man used a horsewhip to rescue his wife from the crowd.

In Plano, Illinois, the occupants of a saloon removed themselves to the second floor of the building and dumped “the contents of baser toiletware” on the crusaders below. (*3)  In one town, a man exposed himself to a group kneeling for sidewalk prayer.

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*1: Blocker, ‘Give to the Winds Thy Fears’: The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873-1874 (Greenwood Press, 1985), 43.

*2: Ibid. *3: Ibid., 60.

First Draft Follies: The "Women's Crusade" of the 1870s, Part One

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series at the blog. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. When the material is lengthy, I break it into several parts; this is part one of three. The setting here is the early 1870s, when the American temperance movement, which had been derailed by the Civil War, regrouped and renewed its efforts to eliminate alcohol in the United States.

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The “Women’s Crusade" of the early 1870s was the inadvertent by-product of an otherwise ordinary evening of entertainment. In the 1870s, lectures and speeches were the most common forms of mass entertainment. Experts of all sorts toured the United States speaking to large audiences on everything from homeopathy to hydropathy; transmigration to trans-Atlantic travel.

Among them was Diocletian Lewis, a physician-reformer with interests in abolition, women’s rights, and temperance. In late 1873, he took the platform in front of a crowd of about a thousand at a hall in Fredonia, New York. There, he touted the virtues of temperance, denounced the evils of liquor, and regaled his listeners with tales of drink-induced woe and degeneracy.

Lewis capped his discourse with an anecdote about how, some forty years earlier, his own mother, married to a drunk, had led a group of her friends into a saloon where they prayed until the bar owner was persuaded to shut his doors and find other employment.

The following morning, a hundred or so women who had attended Lewis’s lecture gathered at a Baptist church to discuss what they had heard. Shortly after noon, the women began marching, first to the bar at the Taylor House Hotel, and from there to the city’s eight liquor retail outlets.

At each stop, the women demanded that the male owners of the establishments abandon their devilish business and then prayed for their redemption. Only one of the men so targeted agreed to find another line of trade.

Over the next few weeks, the Women’s Crusade spread across New York and the midwest. It arrived in Milwaukee in late February when the city’s “gentle raiders” mailed postcards to hundreds of saloons. "Sir,” the cards read, “believing your own conscience must smite you for your criminality in dealing out liquid damnation to our husbands, sons and brothers, we propose to aid that conscience by praying in your gilded hall of vice, next Monday March 2.” (*1)

On the appointed day, the women’s efforts provided plenty of entertainment for the throngs who pushed past them on Milwaukee’s sidewalks, but not much else. No saloonkeepers repented; none shut their doors.

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*1: “The Gentle Raiders,” Milwaukee Sentinel March 2, 1874, p. 1.

The Surrealism of Modern Life

You gotta love surrealism, especially when it's live! In person! Happening now! As in my past few days:

As you may know, we midwesterners just experienced a giganto-super-wallopy snow storm. The snow and wind started Tuesday afternoon and stayed with us until Wednesday afternoon (at least here in Iowa). Fourteen inches of snow, forty mile-per-hour winds, etc.

Which would have been okay, except that I was supposed to fly to Los Angeles on Thursday morning for a speaking engagement. When the airport shut down Wednesday morning, I got, um, a little worried? Would I make? Should I even try? And what to do if I can't make it? (*1)

To cut to the chase (because someone else's travel woes are about as interesting as someone else's home movies), I got up Thursday morning at 5 am and decided to give it a try. The temperature was  five degrees below zero, the streets had barely been plowed, the interstate was, as the weather people say, 100% snow and ice covered.

Took me 90 minutes to make a trek that usually take about 45 minutes (which, frankly, wasn't bad, given the circumstances). Made it to the airport without mishap. (Thank god. Because sliding off the road and into a ditch in sub-zero weather is not my idea of a good time.)

Boarded one airplane. Landed. Boarded a second plane.

Voila! Hours later I was gazing through the plane's window at --- palm trees, sun, warmth. And about an hour or so after that, I was in the hotel's rooftop, outdoor pool, swimming laps before my speaking gig. That, my friends, is the surrealism of modern life. (*2)

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*1: Being the conscientious soul that I am, I rounded up a substitute in case I couldn't make it: My dear pal and all-round-fabulous-human-being Anat Baron, the producer and director of "Beer Wars," agreed to take my place if need be, short notice and all. How great is that?

*2: Said surrealism is, to be honest, a tad exhausting. By the time I got back to Iowa last night, I was wiped out, especially thanks to a serious interstate traffic snarl of indeterminate nature that turned my forty minute trip back from the airport into an hour and 45-minute nightmare. And then I had to get up this morning and drive back to Des Moines for a previously planned engagement.