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Temperance and Prohibition Era Propaganda: A Study in Rhetoric

By leah rae berk, beginnings: the minister and the physician team up.

In 1805, Benjamin Rush, a physician from Philadelphia, wrote an essay titled "The Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon Man". Rush's writing reflected the changing attitudes towards distilled alcohol at the time, especially among the US medical community. Rush's article drew upon ideas from a century earlier; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, medical practitioners began taking a more scientific approach to medicine. Scientists and doctors like Rush felt that the American public needed to be made aware of the health hazards inherent in alcohol consumption. Rush's argument against the consumption of ardent spirits was not only scientific, but also moral. At the end of his essay, Rush described the moral evils that resulted from the use of distilled spirits such as fraud, theft, uncleanliness and murder (Runes 339). Not long after Rush began writing about alcohol's detrimental effects on moral and physical health, he began a correspondence with the Boston Minister Jeremy Belknap. The physician and the minister soon became collaborators, using a mixture of scientific and moral claims in their fight against the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

The teaming up of the minister and the physician is emblematic of a century of rhetoric surrounding alcohol use and abuse in America. For over a century, Americans argued for abstinence from alcohol using a combination of scientific and moral reasons. What made Rush and Belknap's writing compelling and persuasive for many Americans? Why did later propaganda continue to use Rush and Belknap's two-fold argument against alcohol consumption? In this paper I will address these questions by discussing the rhetorical methods used in Temperance and Prohibition Era propaganda.

Anti-liquor Propaganda: A Study in Rhetoric

W. J. Rorabaugh, author of the 1979 book The Alcoholic Republic, wrote "Temperance reformers…flooded America with propaganda" (196). Rorabaugh cited the American Tract Society as one example: by 1851 the Society had distributed nearly five million temperance pamphlets (196). Pamphlets and propaganda were an essential aspect of the American antiliquor crusade, from the Temperance Movement through the Prohibition Era. Although these publications came in a variety of forms and styles, they all used two fundamental rhetorical techniques: logos and pathos. Logos is an appeal to logic; it includes scientific evidence, statistics, facts and other provable forms of information. Rush's use of scientific evidence in "The Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon Man" is an example of logos. A subcategory of logos is ethos or credibility. Not only should facts be provable, they must also come from a trustworthy and reliable source.

The second rhetorical technique employed by anti-liquor propaganda is pathos or appeals to emotion. The final part of Rush's essay dealing with morals and value judgments is based in pathos. Both logos and pathos played an important role in Temperance and Prohibition era propaganda, although ultimately, pathos proved to be the most widely used rhetorical method. Temperance and Prohibition era propaganda appealed to emotion through religious language, drawing upon the prevalent morals and values of the times. Both the Temperance Movement and Prohibition Era coincided with periods of intense religious fervor in the US. These religious revivals were steeped in Puritan moral codes which in turn served as the basis for the underlying ideology of antiliquor propaganda.

Temperance, Prohibition and the Puritans: A Brief History

Widespread religious fervor was a central feature of the Temperance and Prohibition eras. In the early nineteenth century, a religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening took the nation by storm (284). As James Morone wrote in his recent book, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, "With preachers announcing that the millennium lay at hand, men and women began to swear off hard spirits; the yearning for perfection drew them until they were pledging total abstinence" (284). Many of the original Temperance societies had religious affiliations, like the evangelical American Temperance Society which was founded in 1826. Ten years later, at the evangelical American Temperance Society's height, one out of every ten Americans was a member (Morone 284).

Roughly a century later, in the 1910s, there was conservative religious revival in the United States. The religious movements of the Prohibition Era promoted a back to basics approach with a clear, narrow definition of what it meant to be a faithful, observant Christian. Protestant fundamentalists warned of the approaching millennium and the Second Coming of Christ and criticized "the nation's slack morals, 'creampuff' religions" and "'godless social service nonsense'" (Morone 335). Fundamentalist preachers like Billy Sunday told Americans that "the path to heaven ran through a literal reading of the Bible" (335).

Prohibition provided political backing and legitimacy for the religious revivals of the early twentieth century. While critics scoffed at the fundamentalists' stance on the coming millennium and interpretations of the bible, calling them backwards and extreme, Christian fundamentalists held their ground regarding their anti-drinking crusade. According to Morone, "Prohibition offered them [fundamentalists] their one link to national authority, the one public commitment to resisting moral decay" (337).

The morals and values that the religious revivals of the Temperance and Prohibition Eras promoted were steeped in Puritan ideology. Who were the Puritans? What were their fundamental beliefs?

Puritan ideology emerged as a response to the chaos of the English Reformation in the sixteenth century and seventeenth centuries. The original Puritans criticized the corruption in the Church of England and demanded a return to religious purity. Critics mocked these people, calling them "Puritans," and the name stuck.

The Puritans were among the original English settlers of North America; their first fleet arrived in Massachusetts in 1630. According to James Morone, "No aspect of the Puritan world is more often recalled than the notion of a mission, an errand in the wilderness sealed by a covenant with God" (35). The mission of the Early American Puritans hinged upon the concepts of individual and communal responsibility. Individuals controlled their final destinies: salvation for the righteous and eternal damnation for the sinners, however, the Puritan covenant held the entire community responsible for sinners in this life. God would punish all, saint and sinner alike, with disease, drought, famine and other misfortunes if a community did not reform its sinners. How could individuals and communities achieve success and salvation? According to the Puritans, the answer lay in education, discipline and hard work. Puritans defined the home as the primary place of instruction and saw parents as the most important moral models and instructors for children. Industriousness was a virtue with positive outcomes in this life and the afterlife. The Puritans' emphasis on the importance of hard work developed into what it commonly known as the "Protestant work ethic" (Morone 15). The Early American Puritan values of individual and communal salvation, hard work and the proper education of children are constant themes in Temperance and Prohibition Era propaganda.

Types of Propaganda

I found five major categories of Temperance and Prohibition Era propaganda: scientific pamphlets, religious pamphlets, posters, children's pamphlets and the fifth category, songs and poems. Using examples of these five forms of propaganda, I will discuss how Temperance and Prohibition Era propaganda used logos and pathos and why these rhetorical techniques were effective.

Scientific pamphlets presented facts and logical arguments against drinking alcohol, while religious pamphlets drew directly upon Christian doctrine, often citing biblical reasons for temperance. Although the terms scientific and religious seem to translate directly in logos and pathos, both types of propaganda used a mixture of rational and emotional appeals to promote abstinence from alcohol.

The scientific pamphlets claimed proven, scientific evidence and practical advice as the basis for their arguments. Titles such as "Alcohol: Practical Facts for Practical People" and "Answers to Favorite Wet Arguments," both from the early 1900s, reinforced the idea that these pamphlets contained factual, objective truth. Most pamphlets also established their ethos or credibility by citing the research and conclusions of experts, including doctors and scientists. The names of the associations distributing these pamphlets, such as the Scientific Temperance Federation of Boston, added to this air of scientific credibility.

Scientific pamphlets also found truth in numbers, using statistics to prove that alcohol was harmful to individuals and society. Pamphlets like "The Cost of Beer (1880s)" and "A Way to Make Money - And a Better Way (early 1900s)" discussed the personal and social expenses of drinking. First they appealed to logos, using statistical evidence. These pamphlets calculated the cost of alcohol, from the price per gallon to the cost of yearly consumption in cities like New York. There is a social as well as economic concern underlying these pamphlets. For example, "The Cost of Beer" addressed pathos by claiming that alcohol consumption leads to noise, broils, stupidity and drunkenness.

The underlying message of many of the scientific pamphlets was that an individual must know all the facts in order to make an informed decision. Yet, the information provided in these pamphlets pointed to only one viable option: temperance. To further the idea that abstinence was obviously the one true answer, a number of scientific temperance pamphlets had rhetorical questions as titles, such as these pamphlets from the early 1900s: "Do you want to be efficient?" "Do you want to be powerful?" and "Do you want a better rating?" Who could say no to these questions? These titles in the form of rhetorical questions likely piqued readers' interest, and, as in the case of "The Cost of Beer," these pamphlets intertwined logical, moral and emotional appeals.

The three pamphlets "Do you want to be efficient?" "Do you want to be powerful?" and "Do you want to a better rating?" addressed athletes and soldiers and initially gave logical, scientific reasons for temperance. The first reason was that alcohol is unhealthy. "Do you want to be efficient?" quoted a noted European psychiatrist who said that "Alcohol in all forms and doses is a poison." Reasons regarding the health problems resulting from alcohol drew upon a variety of scientific fields including psychology, human biology, neuroscience and medicine. These reasons led to the same conclusion: alcohol interferes with mental and physical processes, hurting the body and putting the drinker at a disadvantage. For example, one of the section headings of "Do you want a better rating?" read "Mere Physical Fitness Is Not All" and included the following quotations:

Physical fitness is a farce without self-control, judgment, and discretion, which are the three qualities of mind first to be dulled by and made incompetent by the use of alcohol. - Dr. Haven Emerson

One of the effects of alcohol is to interfere with the coordination of nerve and muscle. It has been repeatedly found that moderate amounts of alcohol interfere with skilled actions which depend on this co-ordination, such as rifle shooting and typing speed. - Dr. E. H. Derrick, M.D.

These quotations not only bring up the health reasons for temperance but also a second reason: abstainers are more industrious and productive. This is another form of logos which uses practical, rather than scientific, knowledge. While the scientific evidence was impressive because it drew upon information and resources that may otherwise have been inaccessible to many readers, these more practical arguments were compelling because they were familiar, appealing to a deeply-ingrained value, the Protestant work ethic.

Like "The Cost of Beer," these three pamphlets addressed pathos by discussing social as well as physical health, an argument which hearkened to the Puritan idea of social welfare. The pamphlet "Do you want to be powerful?" stated:

Experiment shows that drinking but one small bottle of beer or one glass of wine may impair a man's driving capacity… Practically all the hit-run fatal accidents are caused by drunken drivers, says Frank A. Goodwin, Massachusetts Registrar of Motor Vehicles.

This common sense reasoning seems to be an appeal to logic: drinking interferes with one's ability to drive. Individual safety, however, was not the primary concern. The underlying message of this quotation was to alert drivers that their drinking could have harmful effects on others. The example the quotation uses, hit-run accidents, is an appeal to pathos, because it conjures up the image of an innocent victim who is left injured while the driver speeds away. The implication is that people who drink and drive are irresponsible and hurt others, clearly disregarding the Puritan value of concern and consideration for members of one's community.

Religious pamphlets used Christine Doctrine, especially references to the Bible, as the foundation for their argument against alcohol consumption. Pamphlets like "The Holy Bible and Drink" and "Christian Temperance Catechism" (both from the early 1900s) quoted passages from the bible that warned against the evils of drinking. Directly quoting the bible was taken from the Puritan tradition where "emphasis is nearly always on the Bible, which they [the Puritans] saw in sharp contrast to tradition and to merely human ideas and usages" (Emerson 46). "The Holy Bible and Drink" presented twenty frequently asked questions about alcohol consumption from "What about 'one will not hurt you'?" to "What about drunkards being saved?" (2) and a list of pro-temperance answers in the form of quotations from the bible. "Christian Temperance Catechism" took a more step by step approach, using a series of questions and answers which drew on Christian Doctrine and sometimes included quotations from the scriptures. It began with the simplest and most innocuous seeming question and answer: "What is temperance? The proper control of appetite" (1). The questions and answers become more specific and emotionally charged throughout the pamphlet, ending with question and answers like "How can we work successfully against intemperance? By learning and by showing others how the use of intoxicants ruins soul and body" (8). Although these pamphlets followed a logos structure with logical arguments citing evidence from an established source, i.e. the bible, their underlying messages appealed to pathos. For example, "Christian Temperance Catechism" mentioned alcohol as a major source of suffering in society, both spiritual and physical. According to this pamphlet, American society suffered more from intemperance than all other forms of sin and claimed alcohol was a poison and "the cause of three fourths of all of the disease and proverty [sic] and sorrow and crime in our land" (2).

Not all Religious pamphlets utilized a logos format to fight temperance. The early twentieth century pamphlet "Don't Unwittingly Join The Enemy's Forces" is a clear appeal to pathos. Taken from an address given by Bishop Nicholson of the Methodist Episcopal Church, this pamphlet draws upon the Puritan tradition of preaching. The Puritans placed great emphasis on preaching and most "insisted that 'human authorities' have no place in sermons" (Emerson 45). Religious leaders supporting the Temperance movement, like Bishop Nicholson, saw the fight against intemperance as a crusade, literally a holy war. The authority justifying and supporting this fight was not mere human beings, but God.

In his address Bishop Nicholson appealed to deeply held American values and Puritan morals, describing intemperance as a threat to democracy and morality. Nicholson, like many Temperance leaders, described the struggle against liquor as a second American revolution; first Americans freed themselves from the British, now they must free themselves from alcohol. This argument drew upon the American value of liberty and Puritan morals concerning individual and communal responsibility and salvation.

As in a crusade, there was a clearly defined enemy in Nicholson's address. Nicholson not only criticized his opposition, the "wets" or anti-Temperance supporters, he vilified them. Nicholson inspired pathos by describing those who protested temperance as hateful, unprincipled and criminal men with unworthy motives. His argument was passionate and urgent. Not only was the fight against intemperance "the greatest struggle since the Civil War for the effectuation of Democracy" (2), it was a "life and death struggle with the greatest single evil of the ages…the most unprincipled, the most unscrupulous, and the most Satanic forces possible to conceive" (5).

Following in the tradition of Puritan preaching, Nicholson explained that the fight against intemperance was not merely a human endeavor, but God's mission: "God expects every man and every woman to do his or her duty…" (5) He conflated divine and earthly aspirations, saying that people can take part in God's mission by voting against pro-liquor legislation. Nicholson then took his appeal to pathos a step further, claiming that those who do not actively fight intemperance were supporting the enemy, (hence the title of the pamphlet "Don't Unwittingly Join the Enemy's Forces") and therefore neglecting their responsibilities as American Patriots and Christians. He criticized voter apathy, describing those who do not vote as "criminal and unpatriotic" (5), because by not voting these people were effectively giving their vote to the enemy.

Although some religious pamphlets did contain appeals to logos in their structure or actual arguments, the overarching rhetorical technique in this form of propaganda was pathos. Religious pamphlets evoked emotional responses by appealing to people's deeply held religious values and patriotic sentiments.

In many ways, Temperance and Prohibition Era posters offered a condensed version of the scientific and religious pamphlets, presenting their most striking and compelling arguments through images and sound bytes. Many of the posters took the Benjamin Rush approach, showing scientific and logical evidence to prove that alcohol consumption was detrimental to both body and soul.

Many posters referred to scientific studies and statistical information, citing medical and scientific experts for ethos. Like the titles of scientific pamphlets (ex. "Alcohol: Practical Facts for Practical People"), the headings of the posters purported indisputable information. Poster headings like "Deaths, Defect, Dwarfings in the Young of Alcoholized Guinea Pigs," "Death Rate From Various Diseases in Drinkers and General Class" and "Insurance Records Show that Drink Shortens Life 11%" with their graphs and charts hardly seem debatable. Despite their scientific and factual claims, many of the underlying messages of these posters were steeped in Puritan morality and appeals to pathos.

Temperance Era posters hinted both at the importance of responsible parenting and the Protestant work ethic, both deeply held Puritan values. A number of posters described how children of alcoholic parents suffered developmentally, both physically and emotionally, citing statistics and scientific studies as proof. Some described how parents who drink have a higher rate of defective children: "Defective Children Increased with Alcoholization of Fathers," "Drinkers' Children Developed More Slowly," "Hand in Hand: Feeblemindedness and Alcoholism: More alcoholism found in parents of Feebleminded than those of Normal Children" and "Child Death Rate Higher in Drinkers' Families." Others depicted the psychological problems drinking caused children: "Drink the Largest Cause of Unhappy Homes in Chicago," "Children in Misery, Parent's Drink to Blame in at Least Three Cases Out of Every Four" and "Drink Burdens Childhood."

Temperance and Prohibition Era posters described alcohol as the source of society's individual and social problems. Alcohol was the cause of laziness, inability to concentrate and other impediments to the ideals of success and the Protestant work ethic as noted in the posters: "Drink Impaired Scholarship," "The Better Chances of the Sober Workman," "Alcohol Impairs Muscle Work" and "Daily Drinking Impaired Memory." Like the scientific pamphlets, these posters used charts, percentages, results from studies and quotations from scientific and medical experts.

Still other posters were more explicitly moralizing, like the following poster which drew upon the Puritan value of care for others:

DRINK MAKES ONE MORE LIABLE TO ACCIDENT WHAT THE ACCIDENT INSURANCE COMPANY SAYS: "A man whose nerves have been made unsteady by a recent debauch or by the habitual use of alcohol, should not be permitted to operate dangerous machinery or to carry on dangerous work. He endangers not only his own life, but the lives of others."

The last line, "He endangers not only his own life, but the lives of others," is italicized, the implication being that individuals must care about the welfare of their fellow human beings.

A number of Temperance and Prohibition Era posters, like a number of the religious pamphlets, used a logos format to make a pathos appeal. These posters contained graphs and statistical information, presenting moral claims as factual information, such as "Alcoholism and Degeneracy," "Intemperance as a Cause of Poverty Greatly Reduced Since Prohibition" and "Drink A Great Cause of Immorality." The poster "Drink A Great Cause of Immorality" showed the results of a study of 865 Immoral Inebriate Women, claiming that 40% of their immorality was due solely to drink, including as evidence a statement by a medical expert: "There is no apparent reason why any of the persons…should have become immoral but for preceding alcoholism." "Intemperance as a Cause of Poverty Greatly Reduced Since Prohibition" presented a graph that tracked the drop in poverty as a result of increased temperance, therefore conflating intemperance and immoral behavior with greater social ills like poverty.

Posters are a powerful form of propaganda; their succinct and striking messages create a sense of urgency. In a poster, complex and extensive information must be condensed into a few words and images. Temperance and Prohibition Era posters did just this, using startling information and making emotional appeals to Americans' most deeply held morals and values.

A significant amount of Temperance and Prohibition Era propaganda was targeted towards children. Since logical and scientific arguments may not have made sense to young children, the main rhetorical technique in children's pamphlets was pathos. This form of anti-liquor propaganda related children's emotional responses and experiences to moral issues.

The large quantity of temperance pamphlets targeted towards children was likely a result of Puritan ideology. According to the Puritans, children's moral education began at home; as the Puritan minister and saint Richard Greenham, wrote in his essay "Of the good education of children":

If parents would have their children blessed at church and school, let them beware they give their children no corrupt examples at home by any carelessness, profaneness or ungodliness. Otherwise, parents will do them more harm at home than both pastors and schoolmasters can do them good abroad. (Emerson 152)

Although these pamphlets are written for children, it is probable that they are also targeting parents. A central theme in many children's pamphlets is the role of parents in promoting temperance and how a child should react if his/her parent is intemperate.

Children's pamphlets generally began with an illustration and a story about a child or an animal whose experiences served as a subtle or direct warning against intemperance. The next section would usually contain a poem, dialogue or mini-story which reinforced the ideas presented in the first story. Many of these pamphlets also ended with advice, telling children to abstain from alcohol and to join the temperance crusade. Two examples of children's pamphlets are "Grandmother's boy (1880s)" and "Look out for the trap! (1870s)"

The cover story of "Grandmother's boy" deals directly with Puritan values concerning salvation and good parenting. In the pamphlet's opening story, a little boy who has been raised by his pro-temperance grandmother pays his father a visit. The father is a wealthy, educated man who is enjoying a bottle of wine with his friends. The son, who has taken the temperance pledge, embarrasses his father, asking him why he is drinking alcohol, and then says: " 'If I'd known you drinked such stuff, I shouldn't wanted to come and see you. It makes folks drunkards, and makes them so wicked they can't go to heaven (3-4).'" The child's reaction to his father's drinking appeals to pathos, especially fear, in two ways. First, it plays upon parents' fear that their children will lose respect for them and not want to spend time with them. Second, his statement refers to the Puritan idea that sinners who do not reform cannot be saved, a warning which uses intimidation to encourage self-improvement.

The following section in the pamphlet "Grandmother's boy" is a poem titled "Johnny's Soliloquy," which expresses the messages of the first story even more explicitly. The poem encourages children to serve as models to their parents, as in the phrase, "The boy is father to the man (3)" which is repeated throughout the poem. By taking the temperance pledge of total abstinence from alcohol and encouraging their parents to do so, children modeled the Puritan ideal of saving oneself and others.

The last two paragraphs of the "Grandmother's Boy" titled "Stand Firm!" make a stirring call to arms. Describing temperance as the "way of truth and right (4)," this section of the pamphlet reads like an excerpt from a passionate sermon. It draws upon the crusade concept, telling the reader that "God will help us" and that the struggle against temptation is a fight children can and must win.

The children's pamphlet "Look out for the trap!" also warns against the dangers of temptation. This pamphlet begins with a picture and story of two squirrels. As in an Aesop's fable, the two squirrels come into trouble as a result of their own foolishness - both fell prey to temptation - and there is a moral at the end of the story: "Children, avoid temptation. Always be sure there is no trap beyond" (2). In this story the trap beyond is set by Charlie Wood, who tempts the squirrels into his home with good food. Once Charlie slams the door shut, the squirrels realize that "they were no longer their own masters" (2). Charlie's imprisonment of the squirrels is analogous to, as temperance supporters would have put it, a drunkard's enslavement to drink.

The story of the two squirrels ends with an anecdote. The narrator switches from third person omniscient to a more conversational, first person, telling the reader he saw a young boy give in to temptation. Worst of all, the one who tempted him was his mother. This final appeal to pathos is meant to shock both children and parents and to show children that even though their parents may have the best intentions, those intentions may be wrong and harmful.

The second part of "Look out for the trap!" is a short story titled "Why Joseph Signed the Pledge." The story draws upon a common theme in Temperance propaganda: a child living in poverty whose father is a drunkard and therefore cannot provide for his family. The story evokes a great deal of pity for Joseph, the protagonist, who is taunted by a wealthier classmate. "Oh! You needn't feel so big…" says the classmate, "your folks are poor and your father is a drunkard" (3).

The story describes the Puritan ideal of redemption through self-improvement and helping others. Joseph's mother reminds him to depend upon his own energies, trust in God and remember that he is responsible only for his own faults (4). Joseph remembers his mother's advice and, through his hard work and determination achieves the epitome of the Protestant work ethic, becoming "a useful and respected man." He follows the Puritan value of individual and communal improvement by helping his father become "a sober man and 'respected by other folks'" (4). The boy who taunted Joseph in school, however, lives to see his wealthy father become poor and a drunkard.

Joseph's story concludes with a piece of advice: "Boys, never twit another for what he can not help" (4). The moral of the story is a direct reference to the gold rule (i.e. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you) and appeals to human compassion, kindness and respect.

"Grandmother's boy," "Look out for the trap" and many other children's pamphlets present a dilemma whose solution is temperance. The dilemma is an extreme situation, often of pain, suffering or another intense emotion which must be immediately and directly addressed. Abstinence from alcohol is always the happy ending - as soon as the characters in the story swear off spirits they become successful, happy and achieve salvation.

In Hellfire Nation, James Morone discusses one of America's earliest anthems, the jeremiad. Dating back to the seventeenth century, the jeremiad was "a lament that the people have fallen into sinful ways and face ruin unless they swiftly reform" (14). The jeremiad described specific crimes which had invoked God's wrath, scolding Americans for their moral degeneracy, and reminding people of "their mission with an immodest goal: redeem the world" (Morone 42, 45).

The poems and songs of the Temperance and Prohibition Eras were direct descendants of the jeremiad. Like the jeremiad, these poems and songs defined a specific problem, intemperance, its ruinous effects on both individual and society, and the need for personal and communal responsibility and reform. Three central themes in Temperance era songs and poetry were the drunkard's story, the crusade and temperance as a form of liberty.

Although their themes were similar to other Temperance and Prohibition Era propaganda, songs and poems had a distinct style and structure. Unlike scientific and religious pamphlets, posters, and children's pamphlets, which used text and images, songs and poems formed part of an oral tradition. While a reader can always re-read a complex argument or refer to a new fact or statistic in a text, a listener cannot re-hear a song or poem. As a result, the songs and poems are more repetitive and direct, drawing upon common themes and widely accepted ideas rather than introducing new information. Like children's pamphlets, Temperance and Prohibition Era songs and poems use pathos more or less exclusively.

Many songs and poems speak specifically to the plight of drunkards, both as an example of the dangers of intemperance and to encourage people to join the temperance crusade. Religious references are especially prevalent: alcohol is described as an evil temptation and the devil's agent. Drunkards are those who have fallen from grace; they have lost control of their lives and sunk to ruin and damnation. According to these poems and songs, alcohol is to blame for most of society's ills. Once complete abstinence is achieved, prisons will empty, crime will cease, humanity will be saved and the kingdom of heaven will reign on earth.

The poems "The Curse of Rum (1800s)" and "The Face Upon the Floor (early 1900s)" and the song "The Drunkard's Fall (early 1900s)" depict the dangers of drinking and the plight of the drunkard. "The Curse of Rum" draws upon common religious themes in order to demonize alcohol. The poem describes rum as the serpent from the Garden of Eden, a "soul destroyer" (1) that has destroyed the paradise of the home by bringing disease and sin into society.

The underlying message in these songs and poems is not to take the first drink, because once people begin, they lose control and cannot stop. According to "The Face Upon the Floor" and "The Drunkard's Fall," even the most successful and promising individuals can fall prey to alcohol's evils once they take their first drink. "The Face Upon the Floor" depicts a penniless, filthy, wretched drunkard who wanders into a bar and tells a group of young men his story, from wealth, good looks and a loving wife to how drinking led him to current state, and then falls to the floor dead. "The Drunkard's Fall," whose subtitle reads "a warning for all college men wherein is declared how a Yale man was fired yesterday for over-cutting" describes how even the best and the brightest fall to ruin once they take to drinking. As the refrain states: "He was a Yale man, but he done all wrong." The young man becomes apathetic, lazy and eventually goes insane from drinking. Neither he nor the drunkard in "The Face Upon The Floor" can achieve the goals of the Protestant work ethic or reach spiritual salvation. Their alcohol abuse has taken away their capabilities for productivity and success, both on earth and in the world to come.

Songs and poetry make more direct appeals to pathos than other types of temperance propaganda because of their oversimplification and use of hyperbole. Oftentimes the title of a song or poem is enough to evoke a strong emotional response, as in the case of the song title "Father's a Drunkard and Mother is Dead (1866)." Song and poem titles may give a clear warning or command, like the songs "Girls, Wait For A Temperance Man (1867)" and "Help The Fallen Brother (mid to late 1800s)." The first song is a reference to the Puritan ideal of good parenting and addresses both children's' and parents' fears that children will not be taken care of and even abandoned. "Help The Fallen Brother" is a clear appeal to compassion and the Puritan idea that everyone must be reformed in order for a community to achieve success and salvation.

The solution to these individual and social ills, as mentioned in other types of Temperance Propaganda, was the crusade. The first verse and chorus of the "Anti-Saloon Battle Hymn (1907)" for example, provides a rousing call to arms:

The might are gathering for conflict; / The right is arrayed against wrong; / The hosts of the righteous are singing, / And this is the voice of their song: — Cho. — The Saloon, it must go! Do you hear us?/ Repeat it again and again. They strive to make millions of money;/ We strive to save hundreds of men!

As in Bishop Nicholson's address, the enemy, in this case the saloon, is clearly defined and its motives are proclaimed immoral and unjust. The battle hymn describes the saloon as an "awful, unspeakable monster" and asks God to free the people of the United states from its shackles.

Metaphors of slavery and liberation and their relationship to the temperance crusade are a significant aspect of Temperance era songs and poetry. The song "Emancipation (1914)" speaks of America as a nation with "True liberty so grand,/ that makes men free" and alcohol as a monster that enslaves Americans. The song conflates the crusade's mission with Puritan ideals of personal and communal salvation, ending with the stanza:

This is the hope of all / To see the traffic fall, / And not one slave. Then wave from sea to sea, / By union temperance plea, / Old Glory's jubilee, / Our nation free!

Even the most convincing anti-temperance supporter would have been hard pressed to refute the stanza above. It makes a powerful appeal to pathos, addressing many Americans' pride in their freedom and faith. How could anyone question such fundamental beliefs? And, if anyone did, who would listen?

Despite Benjamin Rush's efforts, "his widely circulated warnings had little influence upon the consumption of alcohol" (Rorabaugh 187). In fact, alcohol consumption actually rose during Rush's anti-liquor crusade and did not begin to decrease until the early 1830s (Rorabaugh 187). W.J. Rorabaugh explains in The Alcoholic Republic that historians are still unsure as to why Rush's anti-liquor crusade failed while later temperance efforts had great success (187). I propose that the answer lies in the rhetoric.

Benjamin Rush took a logos approach to promoting temperance, noting the harmful physiological effects of alcohol. He did not appeal to pathos until the end of "The Effect of Ardent Spirits Upon Man," when he described the moral depravity and social ills caused by alcohol consumption. Rush's use of pathos may have been too little too late. The weakness of using a logical argument is that it can be refuted, either with other logical explanations, new information or emotional appeals. It is harder to question people's emotions and deeply held morals and values. To do so would not only be considered offensive, it would also be futile. As I wrote earlier, how could anyone question such fundamental beliefs? And, if anyone did, who would listen?

Temperance and Prohibition Era propaganda were founded on pathos. Although a number of pamphlets drew upon both logos and pathos, many forms of propaganda, including children's pamphlets, songs and poems, used only emotional appeals. Temperance and Prohibition Era propaganda appealed to deeply held beliefs, based upon Puritan ideology and all-American values. While Rush's more scientific arguments could be disputed or ignored, most Americans would not question the importance of God, hard work, personal and communal salvation and freedom.

Works Cited

• "A Way to Make Money and a Better Way." Westerville, Ohio: American Anti-Saloon League Press Bureau, 19--?. Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition: A Brown University Library Digital Collection.

Written in partial fulfillment of requirements for UC 116: Drug and Alcohol Addiction in the American Consciousness (Professor David Lewis — Fall 2004)

What Does the Bible Say About Drinking? Uncovering Scriptural Perspectives

• December 21, 2023

Biblical Perspectives on Alcohol and Drinking

Exploring the Bible provides varied perspectives on alcohol, showcasing its potential as a blessing and its dangers when abused.

The scriptures reflect on wine’s role in festivities, warnings against drunkenness, and guidance for leaders concerning alcohol consumption.

Old Testament References

In the Old Testament, wine is frequently mentioned.

For example, Proverbs 20:1 highlights that wine can lead to mockery and beer to brawling, pointing to the negative outcomes of excessive drinking.

Isaiah also speaks on the matter, cautioning against the lure of alcohol in Isaiah 5:11, where the pursuit of drink from morning to night is depicted as leading people astray.

Wine as a Gift and a Curse

The Bible portrays wine as both a blessing and a potential curse depending on its use. Ecclesiastes 9:7 encourages to “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart,” suggesting approval in moderation.

Conversely, passages like Proverbs 23:31–35 describe wine as deceptive when it “sparkles in the cup” and can lead to “woe, sorrow, and strife” when consumed in excess.

Leadership and Alcohol

Leadership roles within the scriptures come with particular warnings concerning alcohol.

"None of the wicked will understand, but those who are wise will understand." - (Daniel 12:10)

What does this mean for you ? Learn more here .

In Proverbs 31:4-5, it’s advised that it’s not for kings, O Lemuel, nor for rulers to crave wine.

Similarly, 1 Timothy 3:8 calls for deacons in the church to be worthy of respect, sincere, and not indulging in much wine, emphasizing sobriety and self-control.

The Role of Self-Control

A recurring theme in the Bible regarding alcohol is the necessity of self-control. Galatians 5:19-21 lists drunkenness among the acts of the flesh that are incompatible with inheriting the kingdom of God.

Titus also speaks of the virtues in leaders, where being “not given to drunkenness” is part of being upright and holy.

This section has made efforts to directly address the biblical meaning or relevance of the keywords through links and references to scripture, maintaining a friendly tone while remaining informative.

Frequently Asked Questions

When exploring what the Bible says about the use of alcohol, several questions frequently arise.

These questions touch on sin, moderation, Jesus’s actions, celebrations, various translations, and the distinction between moderate drinking and excess.

Is it considered a sin to consume alcohol in Christian teachings?

In Christian teachings, consuming alcohol is not universally regarded as a sin, but there is a clear warning against the abuse of alcohol .

The key is moderation and avoiding behaviors that lead to drunkenness.

What scriptural passages offer guidance on drinking wine in moderation?

Scriptural passages suggest that wine is a gift from God but also caution against its excess.

Verses such as Ephesians 5:18, which says “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit,” offer guidance on drinking wine in moderation .

Can you provide instances where Jesus himself drank wine?

Jesus is recorded to have consumed wine in the New Testament, notably at the Last Supper.

John 2:1-11 details the first miracle of Jesus , turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana, indicating that He participated in social traditions involving wine.

How does Christian scripture address alcohol consumption and festive celebrations?

Christian scripture acknowledges that wine can be a part of festive occasions.

Psalm 104:14-15 praises God for the bounty of the earth, including “wine that gladdens human hearts,” suggesting a positive view of alcohol in celebratory contexts, when used responsibly.

What perspective does the King James Version present on the consumption of alcoholic beverages?

The King James Version of the Bible presents a balanced view on alcohol consumption, with verses like Proverbs 20:1 acknowledging that wine can be a mocker and beer a brawler, cautioning against overindulgence.

Does religious scripture differentiate between drinking in moderation and drunkenness?

Religious scripture clearly differentiates between moderate drinking and drunkenness.

Passages such as Galatians 5:19-21, which list drunkenness as an act of the flesh, draw a distinction, emphasizing that drunkenness is opposed in both the Old and New Testaments.

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Document Deep Dive

This Chart From 1790 Lays Out the Many Dangers of Alcoholism

Founding father Benjamin Rush was greatly concerned with the amount of booze imbibed in post-Revolution America

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

After the Revolutionary war, Americans were drinking staggering amounts of alcohol. Tastes were swiftly changing from ciders and beers, the preference of colonial times, to hard liquors from the nation’s earliest distilleries. By 1830, each person, on average, was swilling more than seven gallons of alcohol per year.

“The tradition in a lot of communities was to have a drink for breakfast. You had a drink mid-morning. You might have whiskey with lunch. You had a beer with dinner, and you ended with a nightcap,” says Bruce Bustard, a curator at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. “There was a fair amount of alcohol consumption by children too.”

Alcohol was thought to stave off fevers and ease digestion. “If you did not drink, you were endangering your health,” says Mark Lender, a historian and coauthor of Drinking in America . “There was a point at which you could not buy life insurance if you did not drink. You were considered ‘crank-brained.’”

So, when Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and foremost physician, spoke of the evils of hard liquor, people thought he was nuts. He published an essay, “An Inquiry Into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind” in 1785, and to a later edition of the essay, released in 1790, he attached a dramatic illustration titled “A Moral and Physical Thermometer.”

The thermometer, now on display in “Spirited Republic: Alcohol in American History,” an exhibition at the National Archives through January 10, 2016, charts the medical conditions, criminal activities and punishments that could come from the frequent drinking of particular cocktails and liquors. Punch, for instance, could cause idleness, sickness and debt. Toddy and egg rum might elicit peevishness, puking and a trip to jail. And, drinking drams of gin, brandy and rum day in and day out was rock bottom as far as Rush was concerned. That habit could lead to murder, madness and, ultimately, the gallows.

Already a vocal proponent of women’s rights and mental health and prison reform, Rush emerged as a great champion of temperance, says Lender. His ideas may have been shocking in his time, but his essay became a bestseller and gradually much of the medical community would see, like he did, that chronic drunkenness itself was a disease. In the 1820s, when the temperance movement was picking up steam, early advocates adopted Rush’s thinking, cautioning against distilled liquors while condoning the drinking of beer, cider and wine in moderation. This distinction between hard liquors and other alcoholic beverages later fell away with the decades-long push for teetotalism, or a complete abstinence from alcohol. Prohibition took effect in 1920, and the 21st amendment repealed the ban on the production, sale, importation and transportation of alcohol 13 years later.

“The conception we have of addiction today can generally be traced back to Benjamin Rush,” says Lender. “There was a point, Rush believed, that the substance, in this case alcohol, controlled the individual rather than the other way around. He thought there was a physical dependence engendered in the body. He was a pioneer.”

Click on the pins on the document to learn more.

“Spirited Republic: Alcohol in American History” is on display in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives through January 10, 2016.

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Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

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Alcohol has periodically been regarded as a public health curse around the world. Two examples here from Cork in Ireland and from New York City illustrate some of the artefacts of the temperance movement in the 19th century.

In New York, wealthy San Francisco born dentist, businessman, and temperance crusader, Henry D Cogswell (1820–1900) proved as committed and energetic as Father Mathew. He campaigned tirelessly to promote the consumption of water rather than alcohol. Cogswell’s memorial is this Temperance Fountain, erected in Tomkins Square Park in New York City.

Surrounded by a simple, classical Doric columned, open temple structure—with a stepped, pyramidal stone pediment—the structure is topped by the classical figure of Hebe, a mythical Greek water carrier (sculptor: Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen c1770–1844).

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Statue of Father Mathew, Cork, Ireland

Temperance Fountain, Tomkins Square Park, New York, USA

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Linked Articles

• In this issue Is epidemiology popular enough? Carlos Alvarez-Dardet John R Ashton Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 2005; 59 253-253 Published Online First: 14 Mar 2005.

Read the full text or download the PDF:

The Good and Evil of Alcohol

Why do people drink why do they abstain.

Posted May 27, 2010

"If you mean the demon drink that poisons the mind, pollutes the body, desecrates family life, and inflames sinners, then I'm against it. But if you mean the elixir of Christmas cheer, the shield against winter chill, the taxable potion that puts needed funds into public coffers to comfort little crippled children, then I'm for it. This is my position, and I will not compromise!"

- A Congressman's response about his attitude toward whiskey.

We are returned to this politician's "insight" (is that the same thing as "equivocation") by "a major new study" (French) referenced in the Telegraph (U.K.): "Moderate drinkers have lower rates of heart disease, obesity and depression than people who abstain from alcohol entirely, the report indicates." Meanwhile, a Spanish study found recently, drinkers are less likely to succumb to Alzheimer's.

Personal disclosure : I earn my living from treating alcoholism and addiction , as well as writing and lecturing about them. I have also received money from alcohol producers. I receive many times as much for the former through my Life Process Program, which is the basis for a residential treatment center - as much in a good month as I have received in the last decade from the latter. I was an adviser on substance use disorders in the American Psychiatric Association's manual, DSM-IV .

Publication disclosure : In the August issue of Addiction Research and Theory, I have a commentary entitled, "Alcohol as Evil - Temperance and Policy" and a rejoinder to comments—one from an English-speaker, the other Italian—entitled, "Civil War in Alcohol Policy: Northern vs. Southern Europe."

A brief history of alcohol in America : Americans drank between three and four times as much per capita in the Colonial period as they do today. Since then, alcohol use has ebbed and flowed in arcing cycles in the United States; a national binge at the turn of the twentieth century led to Prohibition from 1920-1933. Sociologists have analyzed Prohibition as a war between a nativistic Protestant America and an immigrant Catholic one. Cities dominated by immigrants—like New York, Boston, and Detroit—barely acknowledged Prohibition. This split, although attenuated, is still highly evident in America. Twice the percentage of residents of Northeastern states drink alcohol (although still only about two thirds) as do in Southern states such as Kentucky and Tennessee (one third).

But wait. The last two states (33 percent and 30 percent drinkers respectively) are famous whiskey-distilling and moonshine states. Ah, therein lies a story. A remarkable number of Southern counties are still "dry," requiring people to drive to neighboring counties to drink or to drink illegally produced alcohol - both of which are associated with binge drinking.

A brief international analysis of alcohol consumption : After decades of casual observations that Scandinavians and English-speakers are binge drinkers and Southern Europeans drink wine casually with meals, the European Comparative Alcohol Study (ECAS), conducted by Scandinavians, found this was true. Scandinavians, the English and Irish are frequent bingers; Greeks, the Spanish, Italians and French rarely binge. But here's the rub - not only do the latter nations have fewer alcohol-related social problems, they actually have lower death rates due to drinking, even though Southern nations, due to their steady imbibing, drink more! Remarkably, ECAS found an inverse correlation between the amount of alcohol consumed in a country and that country's rate of alcohol-related mortality.

So some people drink alcohol well and healthily; and some binge, which can result in deadly accidents and culminate in periods—perhaps lifetimes—of alcohol abuse and alcoholism.

Is alcohol good or bad? As comments on this post may indicate, people hold different opinions. For some, the deathly, disease-like traits of the substance predominate; for some, the positive, fun and even health-seeking aspects prevail.

Positive and negative attitudes towards alcohol and good and bad experiences with alcohol are related. But—oh, the paradox—the former precede and determine the latter. The Telegraph article cited above noted that, while "recent research has highlighted the health-giving properties of wine and some other alcoholic drinks, the authors of the latest study sound a note of caution."

It may not be that alcohol produces these benefits, but that people who lead good lives are moderate drinkers, not teetotalers. What does this say about what we should teach about alcohol? People with better lives have more positive views of alcohol and alcohol contributes to their lives. (Residents in my treatment program—this does not include you—you have reached a different place at this point in your lives!)

P.S. Please don't send me comments like one I listened to from an active woman alcoholic (NOT a patient): "Don't tell me that your parents teaching you how to drink prevents you from becoming alcoholic—my father took me and my sister into the basement and made us both drink until we became sick—then he said, 'See what drinking does!' And look what happened to me."

I feel she missed my point. She's an example of how conveying negative attitudes about alcohol becomes self-fulfilling. On second thought, go ahead and make such comments.

Copyright (c) Stanton Peele, Ph.D.

Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., is the author of A Scientific Life on the Edge: My Lonely Quest to Change How We See Addiction . He has worked in the addiction field since the publication of Love and Addiction in 1975.

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Article Contents

Introduction, the gin epidemic, the ‘inferior sort of people’, drunkenness, national security, general conclusions and comments.

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THE GIN EPIDEMIC: MUCH ADO ABOUT WHAT?

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Ernest L. Abel, THE GIN EPIDEMIC: MUCH ADO ABOUT WHAT?, Alcohol and Alcoholism , Volume 36, Issue 5, September 2001, Pages 401–405, https://doi.org/10.1093/alcalc/36.5.401

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— While there is no doubt that the era of the ‘gin epidemic’ was associated with poverty and social unrest, the surge in gin drinking was localized to London and was a concomitant, not the cause, of these problems. The two main underlying social problems were widespread overcrowding and poverty. The former was related to an unprecedented migration of people from the country to London. The latter stemmed from an economic ideology called ‘poverty theory’, whose basic premise was that, by keeping the ‘inferior order’ in poverty, English goods would be competitive and would remain that way since workers would be completely dependent on their employers. Widespread overcrowding and poverty led to societal unrest which manifested itself in increased drunkenness when cheap gin became available after Parliament did away with former distilling monopolies that had kept prices high. Reformers ignored the social causes of this unrest and, instead, focused on gin drinking by the poor which they feared was endangering England's wealth and security by enfeebling its labour force, and reducing its manpower by decreasing its population. Part of this hostility was also related to gin itself. While drunkenness was often spoken of affectionately when it was induced by beer, England's national drink, gin was considered a foreign drink, and therefore less acceptable. These concerns were voiced less often after the passage of the Tippling Act of 1751, which resulted in an increase in gin prices and decreased consumption. However, the second half of the century was also a period in which England's military victory over the French gave it new wealth and power, which dispelled upper-class fears about an enfeebled and dissolute working class. It was also an era when new public health measures, such as mass inoculation against smallpox, and a decrease in the marrying age, led to a population increase that dispelled reformist fears about manpower shortages. The conclusion is that, while the lower cost of gin sparked the ‘gin epidemic’, the social unrest associated with this unprecedented surge in gin consumption was exacerbated, rather than caused, by the increase in drinking.

Any history of the ‘evils’ of alcohol will inevitably mention the ‘gin epidemic’, which allegedly besotted England, between 1720 and 1751, and will probably rely on George's (1925/1966) frequently republished graphic account for documenting that history (e.g. Coffey, 1966 ). However, the ‘gin epidemic’ did not occur in a vacuum. This article discusses the nature of the ‘epidemic’, and its social and economic background. A consideration of the gin epidemic in its context, offers a different interpretation of its causes and impact than that suggested by the standard histories of that period such as M. Dorothy George's (1925/1966).

Distillation was common throughout Europe by the Middle Ages, but was fairly uncommon in England, compared to beer and ale production, because a domestic monopoly kept prices very high. In 1689, Parliament banned imports of French wines and spirits and at the same time cancelled the domestic monopoly. Subsequently, anyone who could pay the required duties could set up a distillery business. Distillers became not only producers, but also sellers. The cost of gin fell below the cost of beer and ale (see Spring and Buss, 1977 ) and gin drinking became the favourite alcoholic beverage among the ‘inferior class’.

British statistical abstracts put the annual consumption of gin in England and Wales in 1700 at about 1.23 million gallons. By 1714, consumption was up to almost 2 million gallons per year. By 1735, it was 6.4 million gallons, and by 1751, 7.05 million gallons. In terms of population, per capita consumption increased by up to eightfold from between 1 and 2 pints in 1700 to between 8 and 9 pints, about a gallon per person in 1751 ( Mitchell and Deane, 1962 ). Beer consumption for the same period remained relatively constant at 3 million gallons a year.

George, one of the most influential historians of the early 20th century, blamed the increase in gin consumption for much of the social unrest that also increased during this period (e.g. George, 1925 /1966; Coffey, 1966 ). The most commonly cited support for this argument was that after the passage of the Tippling Act of 1751, which George called a ‘turning point in the social history of London’ ( George, 1925 /1966, p. 49), social unrest declined. The Tippling Act prohibited distillers from selling gin at retail, and levied severe penalties for non-compliance, such as imprisonment, whipping and even deportation for repeat offenders. As a result, gin prices rose, gin consumption steadily declined back to 2 million gallons [beer consumption, however, steadily increased to about 4 million gallons a year ( Mitchell and Deane, 1962 )], and social unrest did decline. However, in this article, I argue that the social unrest prior to and after the Tippling Act was the result of, and was fuelled and exacerbated by, excessive gin drinking, rather than having been its cause.

At the beginning of the 18th century, English society was divided into two basic classes. One, composed of gentlemen, employers and literary figures, was known as the ‘genteel’ class; the other, described by the Middlesex Grand Jury as ‘the meaner, though useful Part of the Nation’, ( Anonymous, 1736 b ), consisted of ‘Day-labourers, men and women Servants, and common Soldiers’. These manual or menial labourers, were also variously called the ‘inferior sort of people’, the ‘inferior rank’, the ‘lower sort’, or the ‘lower orders’ ( Eboranus, 1736 ; Wilson, 1736 ; Miege, 1748 ; Fielding, 1751 ). Though inferior in social status, labourers were the backbone of the nation's prosperity. To maintain that prosperity, ‘reasonable creatures’, the Middlesex Grand Jury's term for its own ‘genteel class’, strongly endorsed what has come to be known as ‘poverty theory’. The basic premise of this theory was that the genteel class comprised England's consumers and the ‘inferior class’ its producers. The wages of the latter of necessity had to be kept low to keep exports competitive and commodities beyond the income of its members, so that they would be forced to work steadily to survive. The corollary to this idea was that the more children these people produced, the greater would be the competition for jobs and the lower the wages that would have to be paid to do them. This in turn meant higher profits and a greater dependence on the part of workers ( Marshall, 1956 ; Gilmour, 1992 ). This theory was buttressed by an underlying belief that God himself had ordained that the ‘inferior class’ had been put on earth to serve the genteel class and the existing social order was a reflection of His will. The clergy supported this assumption with statements to the effect that ‘there can be no society without Government, and no Government without Subordination, or Submission of Inferiors to Superiors.’ (Quoted by Malcolmson, 1981 , p. 15.) Poverty theory took a new direction in Thomas Malthus' (1789) Essay on Population , which contended that while a larger population meant a larger working force, the poor had to be kept in abject poverty to avoid a food crisis that would endanger the welfare of their betters.

Whereas the gin-related drunkenness in 18th century England has typically been associated with the poor, drunkenness itself was commonplace among all social classes. However, the attitudes of the genteel towards their own drunkenness and those of the ‘inferior people’ reflected class distinctions. For the middle and upper classes — the only ones to record their perspective — their own drunkenness was simply amusing. In his Midnight Modern Conversation , for example, William Hogarth depicted drunkenness among well-to-do revellers in a humorous light; the whole scene triangulates on an exuberant drinker in the back of the room who is raising his glass in a toast to all his fellow topers, a tribute, rather than a denunciation of drunken conviviality ( Shesgreen, 1973 ). When Hogarth turned to drinking among the poor, as he did in Gin Lane , his attitude was completely different ( Abel, 2001 ).

Gin drinking among the ‘inferior class’ in the second quarter of the 18th century was attacked as an unprecedented problem not because drunkenness was more commonplace, or because of benevolent concern that it was impairing the health of the poor as individuals, but because of its perceived dangers to the Nation's welfare and economy. When a critic of cheap gin said that ‘it cannot be suppos’d that labouring people can spend their money in both beer and gin’, he wasn’t condemning drunkenness per se , he was merely pointing out that the money being spent was going to the gin makers and sellers instead of their counterparts in the beer industry. In the long run, he warned, the cheaper price for gin would lead to more drunkenness, which was a concern, he said, because their premature deaths would ‘deprive the landowners of a workforce which in turn would result in higher wages, (and) the demand for barley would also be reduced’ ( Holden, 1736 , p. 9). ‘To all this’ (i.e. the decrease in beer consumption and increased labour costs), our social critic added, was the added effect gin drinking had upon ‘the consumption of tobacco, no inconsiderable a branch of his Majesty's revenue, and to which the populace do not a little contribute. An honest man may smoak [ sic ] a pipe or two of tobacco, with a pint or two of good beer, a whole evening, but is so suddenly demolish'd by the force of tyrant gin, that he has scarcely time to puff out half a dozen wiffs' (p. 13).

When the London Grand Jury met at the Old Bailey in 1735 to present to the Lord Mayor ‘such publick Nusances as disturb and annoy the Inhabitants of the City’, among its main complaints was that gin was robbing the ‘lower kind of people’ of their will and power ‘to labor for an honest livelihood, which is a principal Reason of the great Increase of the Poor’ (pp. 2–3). The reason the ‘lower kind’ had no will to labour on behalf of those making this complaint, however, was not because gin enfeebled them, but because they were unwilling to work at hazardous jobs for long hours and low pay. Adam Smith, for instance, noted that, even the most fit carpenters in London did not remain so for more than 8 years, and at the height of their earning capacity, hardly earned enough to buy a newspaper ( Jarrett, 1974 ). In an unusually candid comment, one of the genteel class, an Arthur Young, admitted that ‘nobody but an idiot would expect them to work at such a rate, unless it was their only way of earning their living’ ( Jarrett, 1974 , p. 98). To keep their employees dependent, employers were especially reluctant for them to form and join unions referred to as ‘combinations’, because of the expectation that unionizing would lead to demands for higher wages. Such grievances and concerns were typically couched in terms of the national interest. Employers specifically blamed pub owners for providing a place for workmen to meet and use and for encouraging ‘these journeymen in their unlawful combinations for raising their wages, and lessening their hours’ ( Galton, 1896 ).

These social confrontations became more acute at the beginning of the 18th century as a result of the Enclosure Acts, which expropriated what previously little countryside had been held in common and used by any who cared to do so, and converted it into privately held fields by large landowners. Dispossessed of what little land they had been able to use and faced with extremely hard and oftentimes crippling farm labour that even the strongest couldn’t cope with for more than a few years ( Jarrett, 1974 ), people left their rural homes for cities, especially London. Once they arrived, many were often no better off since there was low demand in the cities and towns for unskilled labourers. Nevertheless, as more and more people migrated to London, serious overcrowding and unemployment occurred, especially for the unskilled, and wages were kept low, because the newcomers would work for less. Left with nothing to do, or unwilling to work for almost nothing, the ‘inferior sort of people’ who had some money repaired to their pubs which had become the centres of working class life in every community ( Spring and Buss, 1977 ); the rest coalesced into an unruly mob.

Not only was gin drinking accused of contributing to idleness, it was also said to be responsible for an increase in crime. ‘Most of the Murders and Robberies lately committed’, said the London Grand Jury ( Anonymous, 1736 a ), ‘have been laid and concentrated at Gin Shops’. It explained that ‘being fired with these Hot Spirits, they are prepared to execute the most bold and daring Attempts’ (p. 4). In 1751, despairing of the vices of the ‘lower order of people’, Henry Fielding, a London Magistrate, author of Tom Jones and other popular books of the era, published an Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers explaining that there were two main causes of crime in England. The first was that the ‘lower order’ was no longer frugal and hardworking because of its wish for ‘luxury’; and this envy drove them to crime to achieve their goal. The second cause was drunkenness on the part of the ‘inferior order’.

While the crime rate did increase during the second quarter of the 18th century, it had been steadily increasing since the previous century ( Beattie, 1986 ) and would be expected to increase with an increase in population and overcrowding. When those factors are taken into account, the crime rate remained relatively stable during the first half of the 18th century during the height of the gin epidemic ( Beattie, 1986 ) and actually rose during the second half of the century, after the epidemic ended ( Langford, 1989 ). Although the ‘inferior class’ was at least as much under siege, ‘criminality, like poverty, is never at an acceptable level from the perspective of propertied classes’ ( Langford, 1989 , p. 155). Most capital crimes were offences against property ( Gilmour, 1992 ). London and Middlesex were considered the most lawless parts of the country, but fewer than 100 murders occurred there from 1749 to 1771 compared to 4000 in Rome, a city a quarter the size of London ( Gilmour, 1992 ). While crime was a perennial concern, the perception that the gin epidemic was responsible for an increase in crime was due more to its changing character and to the way in which the literate and semi-literate public was made aware of it through the growing influence of the popular press, rather than to any real increase in its incidence ( Langford, 1989 ).

To a large degree, the social unrest of the mob, which the genteel class equated with ‘lawlessness’, was due to sharply rising food costs throughout the 18th century. Labouring families spent as much as 50% and sometimes as much as 80% on essential foodstuffs, especially bread or grain. While they could barely make ends meet in good years, when prices shot up in times of poor harvests, families faced starvation. Rioting often occurred, and desperate people turned to robbery and other crimes for money ( Malcolmson, 1981 ), or to gin because it provided calories at a lower cost ( Spring and Buss, 1977 ), although it lacked associated nutrients.

Another of the constant concerns of the upper class was that gin drinking was undermining national security. ‘The Nation (if obliged to enter into a war) will want strong and lusty soldiers, the Merchant sailors, and the Husbandman Labourers’ warned the London Grand Jury ( Anonymous, 1736 a ), in arguing that if ‘the lower class’ continued to besot itself with gin, England would not have the manpower to win a war. Speaking on behalf of the upper class, Sir Robert Walpole and Sir Joseph Jekyll (1736) likewise denounced gin not only for contributing to ‘idleness’ and crime, but also for debilitating its collective manpower and, thereby, for undermining the ability of the Nation to defend itself.

The decreased price for gin and increased consumption in England, especially London, during the first half of the 18th century, occurred in the context of increased overcrowding and widespread poverty. The ‘epidemic’, however, was mainly confined to London, because gin was the preferred drink of the sedentary trades, such as weavers, which were situated in the cities. In the countryside, work was too strenuous for farmers to cope with constant hangovers and they continued to drink the traditional, and slower-acting, beer and ale ( Watney, 1976 ).

Despite the stressful overcrowding and poverty in London, European contemporaries visiting the city invariably wrote that the poor were better off there, than they were on the Continent, where there was no gin epidemic ( Marshall, 1956 ). The reason there was a ‘gin epidemic’ in London and not Paris, is that in London, prices for gin were lower than for beer and ale, whereas in Paris, they were higher than for wine, France's national drink. Wine consumption in Paris was about 40 gallons (155 litres) per person ( Brennan, 1989 ). If gin contained 40% alcohol and wine, 10%, England's 0.4 gallons at the height of the gin epidemic was about 10 times lower than France's 4 gallons per person. France's upper class did not approve of the level of consumption of its lower class, but did not become as strident in its outrage as its English counterpart until the next century, when its own national alcoholic drink was challenged by distilled spirits, which were of foreign origin.

Levels of consumption that are tolerated in different societies reflect underlying attitudes about public drinking as much as attitudes toward types of alcoholic beverages. Whereas France prided itself on its wine and its quality ( Brennan, 1989 ), England prided itself on its beer and ale ( Abel, 2001 ). In France, wine was called ‘boissons hygienique’, the ‘healthy drink’, to distinguish it from distilled drinks ( Brennan, 1989 ), whereas in England, Hogarth describes beer as the ‘happy produce of our Isle’ to distinguish it from gin ( Shesgreen, 1973 ).

In both cities, the common denominator of price influenced consumption among the lower classes, because they were the most responsive to price ( Abel, 1998 ). In England, there was a dramatic upsurge in consumption of gin in the first half of the 18th century, due to the abolition of distilling monopolies; in France, there was a corresponding surge in distilled spirits consumption the following century as a result of a phylloxera epidemic that destroyed the country's vineyards and caused an increase in wine prices. In neither country, however, was drunkenness itself considered a vice until much later ( Watney, 1976 ). As in England, French elites did not begin to criticize lower-class drinking until social unrest in that country coincided with the upsurge in consumption of distilled spirits, which became a metaphor for an irrational proletariat ( Brennan, 1989 ). Thus, one of the issues 18th century London and 19th century Paris had in common in their condemnation of drinking, was that the lower classes were drinking as much as they did.

Poverty was pervasive in 18th century Europe, regardless of whether people drank or did not drink gin, and poverty is strongly related to crime ( Abel, 1980 ). Drunkenness undoubtedly contributed to poverty, and hence crime, but both were also the result of poverty. Gin undoubtedly played a part in London's crime rates, but crime rates increased even more after gin drinking decreased. The same could be said of death rates due to drunkenness which increased from 17 in 1725 to 69 in 1735, but fell after 1736, even though drinking increased ( Clark, 1988 ). Gin drinking therefore could not have been the main factor influencing the crime rate.

Poverty has always been the ever constant handmaiden of crime and poor health, regardless of whether people use alcohol or any other drugs ( Abel, 1980 ; Abel and Hannigan, 1995 ). For the upper classes, which drank mainly beer and wine, gin, the preferred drink of the ‘inferior order’ because of its lower cost, was singled out as responsible for the social problems of the time. The prevailing opinion of the upper class was that, if members of the latter aspired to better themselves, they had but to give up their gin drinking and they would develop greater thrift and thereby improve their living conditions.

If the ‘gin epidemic’ were not the main reason behind the social unrest in London during the first half of the 18th century, how then are we to account for the decrease in upper class concerns about social conditions and unrest following the newly imposed restrictions on its sale and decreased gin consumption after the Tippling Act of 1751?

While the post hoc, propter hoc argument attributes the changes to the end of the gin spree, this is only a partial explanation, and a minor one at that. Of much greater importance was the Seven Years War occurring between 1756 and 1763, which resulted in the creation of a standing army of about 200 000 men. A constant concern of the upper class during the ‘Gin epidemic’ was that, if the ‘labouring poor’ continued to besot itself with gin, England would have lacked the manpower to win a war. The soldiers who fought and brought victory to England in the Seven Years War, however, were none other than the ‘inferior sort of people’ whose stamina and commitment so concerned the grand jurors. The immediate effect of mobilization was the removal of a large proportion of the unemployed from the streets thereby reducing the size of the mob, and ostensibly, its most disapproved element. The long-term legacy was that England's overwhelming triumph over the French put an end to its obsession over a weakened manpower. England's victory proved that the ‘inferior’ people had not been too feeble to defend the country. Not only were they fit enough to do so, these stalwarts were responsible for England's new wealth and power as England extended its influence around the globe ( Langford, 1989 ). The Falklands Islands crisis of 1770 and the rebellion of the American colonies shortly thereafter kept England on a war footing that continued to keep men off the streets (about a quarter of a million English soldiers were in the armed forces during the rebellion) and resulted in less drinking at home. Even the forfeiture of its American colonies was regarded as only a minor setback for England after the speedy recovery of other overseas trade.

Several other changes during this period also silenced concerns about a diminishing manpower. One was the popularization of inoculation against smallpox. Although available as early as 1721, procedures for mass inoculations were not devised until the mid-1760s ( Langford, 1989 ). This markedly improved health and reduced the death rate. Another was an increase in real wages, which resulted in a lowering of the average marriage age of women from under 26 to under 24 ( Lee and Schofield, 1981 ), sparking an increase in birth rate. Although wages declined again, the lowered age for marrying continued after wages fell and the increased population spurt remained in place despite the hardship.

While a number of other historians have begun to question the dire portrayal of the gin epidemic (e.g. Clark, 1988 ; Warner, 1994 ), scepticism of the exaggerated claims was voiced even during the period itself. In one of the most thorough (and modern-sounding allowing for changes in language) of these critiques, an anonymous writer who identified himself only as T.S. (1736) took each of the accusations made earlier against gin and answered them point by point. This was not an apology for gin, but rather a wake-up call to the gentry that the country's social problems were much more deeply rooted and endemic than simply due to cheap gin. Intoxication, he said, was commonplace throughout the world, but it was not so much gin as low wages and unemployment that kept the poor in their perpetual condition. Gin, he said, was being unfairly singled out for inciting people to disturb the peace, when in fact drunkenness of any kind had the same effect. The public peace was ‘as often broke by alehouse-sots and wine-drinkers, as any other’. Nor was the crime rate any higher than before gin's popularity. Excessive drinking was also not the reason more highwaymen were terrorizing travellers. Taking a jab at upper class snobbery, he noted that these highwaymen were not drawn from the inferior classes but ‘ought more properly to be ranked among the wine drinkers’ (i.e. the upper classes who could afford such drinks).

Regarding the health of the nation's workers and their future children, an issue discussed previously at length ( Abel, 2001 ), he expressed skepticism over all the unsupported claims of the nation being weakened by gin. In a kind of ‘put up or shut up’ challenge, he proposed that those making negative health claims about gin, not drunkenness, ‘give some gin to those at his own table and see what happened. I believe they would be found like other men in all respects, and would soon detect the falsity of your worship's suppositions’ (pp. 18–19).

A final reason for the hostility toward gin was nascent nationalism. Gin was a foreign drink, created in Holland, whereas beer was considered England's national and domestic drink, hence the 18th century caricatures of John Bull with an ale-pot in his hand and barley-corns in his hat ( Mathias, 1959 ). This national pride in beer also accounts in part for William Hogarth's portrayal of the socially respectable Beer Street and its socially disreputable companion piece, Gin Lane ( Abel, 2001 ). Once the menace of gin was overcome, reformers found a new foreign import to rail against — tea — and levelled virtually the same charges at it as they had previously directed at gin: Thus, Cobbett (1800/1926) wrote that tea drinking is ‘a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age’.

There is little doubt that the period of the gin epidemic was a disturbing if not frightening time for a great many people when they encountered lawless and drunken mobs whenever they ventured into the streets. The explanation for these conditions, however, was not simply gin mania. While gin consumption was at an all-time high, drunkenness was ‘business as usual’. The combination of displacement, poverty, unemployment, and the vast chasm between the ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ classes created an unstable social environment. Faced with no hope for betterment, people turned to whatever resources they had available within their means to escape. The conclusion is that the ‘gin epidemic’ was a social problem centred in London and its environs. While the upper classes attributed the social unrest of that era to excessive gin drinking on the part of the labouring poor, the unrest had more to do with the labouring poor's response to the appalling living conditions and the endemic poverty associated with the upper class's economic policies of the period, than with excessive drinking.

While reformers pointed to excessive gin drinking as the cause of social unrest, poverty and overcrowding laid the foundation for the era's social problems, and the low cost of gin offered an escape from those realities. Reformers were blind to the economic ideology that produced those conditions, because they were part of the social class that created that ideology. They were also inclined to blame gin because it was not only the preferred drink of the ‘inferior class of people’, but also a ‘foreign’ drink and therefore they could avoid self-recrimination, because they could dismiss problems associated with gin drinking as not of their own making.

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• alcohol intoxication
• military personnel
• social problems
• vaccination
• public health medicine
• distillation
• symptom aggravating factors
• blue-collar workers

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• v.24(1); 2000

Health Risks and Benefits of Alcohol Consumption

Alcohol consumption has consequences for the health and well-being of those who drink and, by extension, the lives of those around them. The research reviewed here represents a wide spectrum of approaches to understanding the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption. These research findings can help shape the efforts of communities to reduce the negative consequences of alcohol consumption, assist health practitioners in advising consumers, and help individuals make informed decisions about drinking.

Forty-four percent of the adult U.S. population (age 18 and over) are current drinkers who have consumed at least 12 drinks in the preceding year ( Dawson et al. 1995 ). Although most people who drink do so safely, the minority who consume alcohol heavily produce an impact that ripples outward to encompass their families, friends, and communities. The following statistics give a glimpse of the magnitude of problem drinking:

• Approximately 14 million Americans—7.4 percent of the population—meet the diagnostic criteria for alcohol abuse or alcoholism ( Grant et al. 1994 ).
• More than one-half of American adults have a close family member who has or has had alcoholism ( Dawson and Grant 1998 ).
• Approximately one in four children younger than 18 years old in the United States is exposed to alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence in the family ( Grant 2000 ).

Measuring the Health Risks and Benefits of Alcohol

Over the years, scientists have documented the effects of alcohol on many of the body’s organ systems and its role in the development of a variety of medical problems, including cardiovascular diseases, liver cirrhosis, and fetal abnormalities. Alcohol use and abuse also contribute to injuries, automobile collisions, and violence. Alcohol can markedly affect worker productivity and absenteeism, family interactions, and school performance, and it can kill, directly or indirectly. On the strength of this evidence, the United States and other countries have expended considerable effort throughout this century to develop and refine effective strategies to limit the negative impact of alcohol ( Bruun et al. 1975 ; Edwards et al. 1994 ).

In the past two decades, however, a growing number of epidemiologic studies have documented an association between alcohol consumption and lower risk for coronary heart disease (CHD), the leading cause of death in many developed countries ( Chadwick and Goode 1998 ; Criqui 1996 a , b ; Zakhari 1997 ). Much remains to be learned about this association, the extent to which it is due specifically to alcohol and not to other associated lifestyle factors, and what the biological mechanisms of such an effect might be.

Effects on Physical Health

Cardiovascular diseases account for more deaths among Americans than any other group of diseases. Several large prospective studies have reported a reduced risk of death from CHD across a wide range of alcohol consumption levels. These include studies among men in the United Kingdom ( Doll et al. 1994 ), Germany ( Keil et al. 1997 ), Japan ( Kitamura et al. 1998 ), and more than 85,000 U.S. women enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Study ( Fuchs et al. 1995 ). In research studies, definitions of moderate drinking vary. However, in these studies, most, if not all, of the apparent protective effect against CHD was realized at low to moderate levels of alcohol consumption.

Follow-up of another large U.S. survey, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I ( Rehm et al. 1997 ), found that after an average of nearly 15 years of follow-up, the incidence of CHD in men who drank was lower across all levels of consumption than in nondrinkers. Incidence also was reduced among women, but only in those consuming low to moderate levels of alcohol. In fact, an increased risk was observed in women consuming more than 28 drinks per week.

An association between moderate drinking and lower risk for CHD does not necessarily mean that alcohol itself is the cause of the lower risk. For example, a review of population studies indicates that the higher mortality risk among abstainers may be attributable to socioeconomic and employment status, mental health, overall health, and health habits such as smoking, rather than participants’ nonuse of alcohol ( Fillmore 1998 ).

It is also important to note that the apparent benefits of moderate drinking on CHD mortality are offset at higher drinking levels by increased risk of death from other types of heart disease, cancer, liver cirrhosis, and trauma. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS), in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, have defined moderate drinking as one drink per day or less for women and two or fewer drinks per day for men ( USDA 1995 ). In addition, the NIAAA further recommends that people aged 65 and older limit their consumption of alcohol to one drink per day.

Cerebrovascular disease, in which arteries in the brain are blocked or narrowed, can lead to a sudden, severe disruption of blood supply to the brain, called a stroke. Ischemic stroke, which is by far the predominant type of stroke, results from a blockage of a blood vessel; hemorrhagic stroke is due to rupture of a blood vessel. Alcohol-related hypertension, or high blood pressure, may increase the risk of both forms of stroke. Yet, in people with normal blood pressure, the risk of ischemic stroke may be decreased due to the apparent ability of alcohol to lessen damage to blood vessels due to lipid deposits and to reduce blood clotting. Alcohol’s anticlotting effects, while perhaps decreasing the risk of ischemic stroke, may increase the risk of hemorrhagic stroke ( Hillbom and Juvela 1996 ). These studies are coming closer to providing a clear picture of the relationship between alcohol and risk of stroke.

The relationship between alcohol consumption and stroke risk has been examined in two recent overviews. In a meta-analysis, researchers compared the relationship between alcohol consumption and the risk of ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes ( English et al. 1995 ). They detected no differences in the risk patterns for the two types of stroke, but found clear evidence that heavy drinking was associated with increased stroke risk, particularly in women.

In contrast, the Cancer Prevention Study II found that, in men, all levels of drinking were associated with a significant decrease in the risk of stroke death, but in women, the decreased risk was significant only among those consuming one drink or less daily ( Thun et al. 1997 ). A recent study reported that among male physicians in the Physicians’ Health Study, those who consumed more than one drink a week had a reduced overall risk of stroke compared with participants who had less than one drink per week ( Berger et al. 1999 ).

Among young people, long-term heavy alcohol consumption has been identified as an important risk factor for stroke ( You et al. 1997 ). Very recent alcohol drinking, particularly drinking to intoxication, has been found to be associated with a significant increase in the risk of ischemic stroke in both men and women aged 16 through 40 years ( Hillbom et al. 1995 ).

The relationship between alcohol consumption and blood pressure is noteworthy because hypertension is a major risk factor for stroke as well as for CHD. A national consensus panel in Canada recently conducted an extensive review of the evidence concerning this relationship ( Campbell et al. 1999 ), concluding that studies have consistently observed an association between heavy alcohol consumption and increased blood pressure in both men and women. However, in many studies comparing lower levels of alcohol use with abstention, findings are mixed. Some studies have found low alcohol consumption to have no effect on blood pressure or to result in a small reduction, while in other studies blood pressure levels increased as alcohol consumption increased.

The possibility that alcohol may protect against CHD has led researchers to hypothesize that alcohol may protect against peripheral vascular disease, a condition in which blood flow to the extremities is impaired due to narrowing of the blood vessels. In a 1985 analysis of data from the Framingham Heart Study, alcohol was not found to have a significant relationship, either harmful or protective, with peripheral vascular disease ( Kannel and McGee 1985 ). However, an important recent study produced different results. In an analysis of the 11-year follow-up data from more than 22,000 men enrolled in the Physicians’ Health Study, researchers found that daily drinkers who consumed seven or more drinks per week had a 26-percent reduction in risk of peripheral vascular disease ( Camargo et al. 1997 ).

Two other studies found inconsistent results with regard to gender. One study of middle-aged and older men and women in Scotland showed that as alcohol consumption increased, the prevalence of peripheral vascular disease declined in men but not in women ( Jepson et al. 1995 ). In contrast, among people with non-insulin-dependent diabetes, alcohol was associated with a lower prevalence of peripheral vascular disease in women but not in men ( Mingardi et al. 1997 ).

There is no question that alcohol abuse contributes significantly to liver-related morbidity (illness) and mortality in the United States. The effects of alcohol on the liver include inflammation (alcoholic hepatitis) and cirrhosis (progressive liver scarring). The risk for liver disease is related to how much a person drinks: the risk is low at low levels of alcohol consumption but increases steeply with higher levels of consumption ( Edwards et al. 1994 ). Gender also may play a role in the development of alcohol-induced liver damage. Some evidence indicates that women are more susceptible than men to the cumulative effects of alcohol on the liver ( Becker et al. 1996 ; Gavaler and Arria 1995 ; Hisatomi et al. 1997 ; Naveau et al. 1997 ).

Definitions Related to Drinking

Studies investigating the health effects of alcohol vary in their definitions of “low,” “moderate,” and “heavy” drinking. According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans , issued jointly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS), moderate drinking is no more than two standard drinks per day for men and no more than one per day for women ( USDA and USDHHS 1995 ). The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism further recommends that people aged 65 and older limit their consumption of alcohol to one drink per day. Information on drinking levels as they are defined in the individual studies cited in this issue can be found in the original references.

How Much Is a Drink?

In the United States, a drink is considered to be 0.5 ounces (oz) or 15 grams of alcohol, which is equivalent to 12 oz (355 milliliters [mL]) of beer, 5 oz (148 mL) of wine, or 1.5 oz (44 mL) of 80-proof distilled spirits.

Does Abstaining Increase Risk?

Epidemiologic evidence has shown that people who drink alcohol heavily are at increased risk for a number of health problems. But some studies described in this section suggest that individuals who abstain from using alcohol also may be at greater risk for a variety of conditions or outcomes, particularly coronary heart disease, than persons who consume small to moderate amounts of alcohol.

This type of relationship may be expressed as a J-shaped or U-shaped curve, which means that the risk of a disease outcome from low to moderate drinking is less than the risk for either abstinence or heavier drinking, producing a curve in the shape of the letter J or U (see figure ).

By examining the lifestyle characteristics of people who consume either no alcohol or varying amounts of alcohol, researchers may uncover other factors that might account for different health outcomes. For example, gender, age, education, physical fitness, diet, and social involvement are among the factors that may be taken into account in determining relative risk of disease.

Similarly, people may quit drinking because of health problems, or even if that is not the case, former drinkers may have characteristics that contribute to their higher mortality risk, such as smoking, drug use, and lower socioeconomic status. If former drinkers are included in the abstainers group, they may make alcohol appear to be more beneficial than it is. Therefore the best research studies will distinguish between former drinkers and those who have never used alcohol.

Rates of death from all causes, all cardiovascular diseases, and alcohol-augmented conditions from 1982 to 1991, according to base-line alcohol consumption.

SOURCE: Thun et al. 1997 . Reprinted with permission from New England Journal of Medicine , Vol. 337, pp. 1705–1714, 1997. Copyright 1997, Massachusetts Medical Society. Waltham, MA. All rights reserved.

• U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Home and Garden Bulletin No. 232. 4th ed. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture; 1995. [ Google Scholar ]

Alcohol has been linked to a number of cancers, including cancers of the head and neck (mouth, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus), digestive tract (stomach, colon, and rectum) and breast ( World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute for Cancer Research [WCRF/AICR] 1997 ; Doll et al. 1993 ; International Agency for Research on Cancer [IARC] 1988 ).

Alcohol is clearly established as a cause of cancer of various tissues in the airway and digestive tract, including the mouth, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus ( Doll et al. 1993 ; IARC 1988 ; La Vecchia and Negri 1989 ; Seitz and Pöschl 1997 ; WCRF/AICR 1997 ). An increased risk of gastric or stomach cancer among alcohol drinkers has been identified in several, but not the majority, of case-control or cohort studies. The link between alcohol use and chronic gastritis (stomach inflammation) is clear, although progression from chronic gastritis to neoplasia is less well understood and probably involves other factors in addition to alcohol ( Bode and Bode 1992 , 1997 ).

In addition, a link between alcohol and breast cancer has been suspected for two decades but the nature of this association remains unclear. (For a more detailed discussion of the role of alcohol in breast cancer, see the article in this issue on medical consequences pp 27–31.)

Psychosocial Consequences and Cognitive Effects

Alcohol use plays a role in many social activities, from the “business lunch” and parties to special occasions. The benefits to those who drink during social occasions are greatly influenced by culture, the setting in which drinking occurs, and expectations about alcohol’s effects ( Goldman et al. 1987 ; Heath 1987 ; Leigh 1989 ; Leigh and Stacy 1991 ). Stress reduction, mood elevation, increased sociability, and relaxation are the most commonly reported psychosocial benefits of drinking alcohol ( Baum-Baicker 1985 ; Hauge and Irgens-Jensen 1990 ; Leigh and Stacy 1991 ; Mäkelä and Mustonen 1988 ).

There is extensive evidence indicating that people who suffer psychological distress and rely on alcohol to relieve their stress are more likely to develop alcohol abuse and dependence ( Castaneda and Cushman 1989 ; Kessler et al. 1996 , 1997 ). Because vulnerability to alcohol dependence varies greatly among individuals, it is difficult to assess the risk of dependence in relation to how much a person drinks. Two persons exposed to alcohol in exactly the same way may or may not have the same outcome for many reasons, including genetic differences, personality, behavioral features, and environment.

Most mental disorders occur much more often than expected by chance among people who are abusing alcohol or are alcohol dependent ( Kessler et al. 1996 ). Of these individuals, those who are alcohol dependent are more likely than alcohol abusers to have mental disorders. In fact, alcohol dependence elevates the risk for all types of affective and anxiety disorders ( Kessler et al. 1996 ).

Although the relationship between heavy alcohol consumption and cognitive impairment is well established, the effects of moderate drinking on the ability to perform cognitive tasks, including remembering, reasoning, and thinking, are largely unexplored.

Most studies of the relationship between alcohol consumption and other forms of dementia, notably Alzheimer’s disease ( Tyas 1996 ), have failed to find statistically significant associations. However, several recent studies suggest that moderate alcohol consumption may have a positive effect on cognitive function. In an analysis of baseline data (data collected at the beginning of a study) for persons aged 59 through 71 who were enrolled in the Epidemiology of Vascular Aging Study in France, moderate alcohol consumption was associated with higher cognitive functioning among women but not men after a number of possible confounding variables were controlled for ( Dufouil et al. 1997 ). Another study, which followed 3,777 community residents in France who drank primarily wine, found a markedly reduced risk of the incidence of dementia among moderate drinkers relative to abstainers ( Orgogozo et al. 1997 ).

Effects on Society

Researchers have identified and classified a wide variety of adverse consequences for people who drink and their families, friends, co-workers, and others they encounter ( Edwards et al. 1994 ; Harford et al. 1991 ; Hilton 1991 a , b ). Alcohol-related problems include economic losses resulting from time off work owing to alcohol-related illness and injury, disruption of family and social relationships, emotional problems, impact on perceived health, violence and aggression, and legal problems.

The risk of such consequences for the individual varies widely and depends on the situation. However, researchers have found a general trend toward an increased risk of adverse effects on society as the average alcohol intake among individuals increases ( Mäkelä and Mustonen 1988 ; Mäkelä and Simpura 1985 ).

Alcohol use is associated with increased risk of injury in a wide variety of circumstances, including automobile crashes, falls, and fires ( Cherpitel 1992 ; Freedland et al. 1993 ; Hingson and Howland 1993 ; Hurst et al. 1994 ). Research shows that as people drink increasing quantities of alcohol, their risk of injury increases steadily and the risk begins to rise at relatively low levels of consumption ( Cherpitel et al. 1995 ). An analysis of risk in relation to alcohol use in the hours leading up to an injury has suggested that the amount of alcohol consumed during the 6 hours prior to injury is related directly to the likelihood of injury occurrence ( Vinson et al. 1995 ). The evidence showed a dose-response relationship between intake and injury risk and found no level of drinking to be without risk.

Patterns of alcohol consumption also increase the risk of violence and the likelihood that aggressive behavior will escalate ( Cherpitel 1994 ; Martin 1992 ; Martin and Bachman 1997 ; Norton and Morgan 1989 ; Zhang et al. 1997 ). Alcohol appears to interact with personality characteristics, such as impulsiveness and other factors related to a personal propensity for violence ( Lang 1993 ; Zhang et al. 1997 ). Violence-related trauma also appears to be more closely linked to alcohol dependence symptoms than to other types of alcohol-related injury ( Cherpitel 1997 ).

Patterns of moderate drinking, on the other hand, have been associated with a key health benefit—that is, a lower CHD risk. Research is now in progress to clarify the extent to which alcohol itself, or other factors or surrogates such as lifestyle, diet, exercise, or additives to alcoholic beverages, may be responsible for the lower risk. Broader means of quantifying the relationships between relative risks and specific consumption levels and patterns are needed to describe epidemiologic findings more clearly and simply, and translate them into improved public health strategies.

The Overall Impact

The overall impact of alcohol consumption on mortality can be assessed in two ways ( Rehm and Bondy 1998 ): (1) by conducting meta-analyses using epidemiologic studies that examine all factors contributing to mortality, or (2) by combining risk for various alcohol-caused diseases with a weighted prevalence or incidence of each respective disease.

The meta-analysis approach to assessing overall mortality was used by researchers to examine the results of 16 studies, 10 of which were conducted in the United States ( English et al. 1995 ). In this overview, researchers found the relationship between alcohol intake and mortality for both men and women to be J-shaped curves: the lowest observed risk for overall mortality was associated with an average of 10 grams of alcohol (less than one drink) per day for men and less for women. An average intake of 20 grams (between one and two drinks) per day for women was associated with a significantly increased risk of death compared with abstainers. The risk for women continued to rise with increased consumption and was 50 percent higher among those consuming an average of 40 grams of alcohol (between three and four drinks) per day than among abstainers. Men who averaged 30 grams of alcohol (two drinks) per day had the same mortality as abstainers, whereas a significant increase in mortality was found for those consuming at least 40 grams of alcohol per day.

The proposed J-shaped relationship between alcohol intake and mortality does not apply in all cases, however. For example, because most of the physiologic benefit of moderate drinking is confined to ischemic cardiovascular conditions, such as CHD, in areas of the world where there is little mortality from cardiovascular diseases, alcohol provides little or no reduction in overall mortality. Rather, the relationship between intake and all-cause mortality assumes more of a direct, linear shape ( Murray and Lopez 1996 c ), with increasing consumption associated with higher overall mortality. The same holds true for people under age 45, who have little ischemic cardiovascular mortality ( Andréasson et al. 1988 , 1991; Rehm and Sempos 1995 ).

Quantifying the level of disability and morbidity related to alcohol can be difficult, in large part because few standardized measures exist. One way to quantify the relationship between alcohol and health-related consequences is to use a measure called the disability-adjusted life year (DALY), which may prove useful in summarizing the effects of alcohol on the full spectrum of health outcomes.

In the Global Burden of Disease Study ( Murray and Lopez, 1996 , 1997 b ), the researchers combined years of life lost and years lived with disability into a single indicator, DALY, in which each year lived with a disability was adjusted according to the severity of the disability ( Murray and Lopez 1997 b , c ). The study found tremendous differences in alcohol’s impact on disability across different regions of the world. The most pronounced overall effect was observed in established market economies. The researchers found the smallest effect of alcohol in the Middle Eastern crescent, which is not surprising given the region’s high proportion of abstinent Islamic populations ( Murray and Lopez 1997 a ).

Epidemiologic studies have long provided evidence of the harm alcohol can cause to individual health and to society as a whole. Newer studies have identified an association between low to moderate alcohol consumption and reduced CHD risk and overall mortality. The most significant association with lower CHD risk is largely confined to middle-aged and older individuals in industrialized countries with high rates of cardiovascular diseases. Elucidation of the mechanisms by which alcohol affects CHD risk will clarify the relationship and may enable scientists to develop pharmacologic agents that could mimic or facilitate the positive effect of alcohol on health ( Hennekens 1996 ; UK Inter-Departmental Working Group 1995 ; USDA 1995 ). At this point, research clearly indicates that no pattern of drinking is without risks. However, for individuals who continue to consume alcohol, certain drinking patterns may help reduce these risks considerably.

Among teenagers and young adults in particular, the risks of alcohol use outweigh any benefits that may accrue later in life, since alcohol abuse and dependence and alcohol-related violent behavior and injuries are all too common in young people and are not easily predicted. To determine the likely net outcome of alcohol consumption, the probable risks and benefits for each drinker must be carefully weighed.

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Liquid Bewitchment Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850

By James Brown

The introduction of gin to England was a delirious and deleterious affair, as tipplers reported a range of effects: loss of reason, frenzy, madness, joy, and death. With the help of prints by George Cruikshank, William Hogarth, and others, James Brown enters the architecture of intoxication — dram shops, gin halls, barbershops — exploring the spaces that catered to pleasure or evil, depending who you asked.

September 13, 2023

William Hogarth, Gin Lane , 1751 — Source .

In 1751, the engraver and satirist William Hogarth created Gin Lane , his celebrated visual retrospective about the devastating effects of this newfangled spirit on the lives of London’s poor. The print, a companion piece to Beer Street , offers a harrowing panorama of poverty, addiction, insanity, violence, infanticide, and suicide; the only people and institutions who thrive amongst the mayhem and despair are an undertaker, “Gripe” the pawnbroker, and the two purveyors of the “deadly draught”: a cellar gin shop and “Kilman” the distiller. In the words of Hogarth’s most recent biographer, Gin Lane ’s “racked scene of dissolution . . . imprints itself indelibly on the mind”. 1 Derivatives are beloved of political cartoonists , and so frequent and dependable is its appearance at academic conferences on alcohol history that a “ gin lane klaxon ” is scurrilously sounded on social media. However grotesquely transfixing the image, its dominance within both the history of alcohol and art has occluded a wider and subtler range of representations of gin and the environments in which it was consumed, which flourished across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 2

The Cursed Bewitching Liquor

Gin was one of a wide range of new intoxicants — including chocolate, coffee, opium, sugar, tea, and tobacco — that, in what has been called a “psychoactive revolution”, radically expanded the mind-altering possibilities for European people between 1600 and 1800. 3 Spirits (mainly aqua vitae, a rough distillation of wine) had been manufactured in English monasteries, private homes, and apothecary’s shops since the late medieval period, although they were prohibitively expensive and generally consumed medicinally and in small quantities. Brandy, rum, whisky, and especially gin exploded the spirituous marketplace from the later decades of the seventeenth century, with various factors — including grain surpluses, restrictions on French imports, a relaxation of the monopoly on distilling, and increased duties on ale and beer — making gin’s rise particularly meteoric. Originally imported from the Netherlands as genever , by the 1690s gin was produced on an industrial scale by domestic malt distillers, who sold their wholesale product to a network of smaller compound producers. These producers then “rectified” it with a variety of botanical additives, including juniper berries, coriander seeds, orange peel, angelica root, liquorice powder, and turpentine. By 1725, according to the Cumbria distiller George Smith, gin had “gain’d such universal applause, especially with the common people . . . there is more of it in quantity sold daily in a great many distillers shops, than of beer and ale vended in most publick houses”. 4

The resulting beverage was orders of magnitude stronger than the traditional alcohols that had hitherto dominated recreation and diets (ales, beers, ciders, and wines), and represented a step change in England’s cultures of intoxication; Jessica Warner has gone so far as to term it “the first modern drug”. 5 Put simply, gin hit early modern drinkers differently, offering “not a gradual descent into inebriation” (in James Nicholls’s phrase) but instantaneous and extreme drunkenness. 6 From this potency stemmed a range of unusual and frightening side-effects, widely rehearsed by eighteenth-century commentators, including immorality, criminality, madness, compulsive intoxication, and death. As one anonymous 1736 author observed, “by taking a small quantity people were almost in an instant rendered so much intoxicated as to lose the use of their reason, and all command over themselves”, and were “induced to commit the most wicked or extravagant enormities”. 7 Likewise, in her 1750 treatise aimed at female gin drinkers, Eliza Haywood warned that whereas conventional beverages made their consumers “sullen, sleepy, or extravagantly gay”, gin made them “bold, obstinate, and filled with an extravagant desire of doing mischief . . . we may say that dram-drinking is the most expeditious way to deprive mankind of their reason . . . by substituting a temporary, and in time a constant frenzy in its stead”. 8 The following year, another anonymous writer agreed that “[i]ts baneful influence reaches their [consumers’] very souls; every virtuous principle is eradicated and destroyed”. Moreover, “once they have habituated themselves to drinking drams, they are never satisfied but while the glass is at their noses”. 9 A recurring contemporary metaphor for gin’s peculiar physical and psychological effects was bewitchment, the subjugation of normal human will and faculties to an insidious supernatural force.

Coloured 1816 aquatint after Thomas Rowlandson titled The Dance of Death: The Dram Shop — Source .

Seminaries of Mischief: Gin Shops

Like other novel intoxicants, gin created an entirely new species of urban space organised around its sale and consumption . As cocoa spawned the chocolate house, coffee the coffeehouse , opium the opium den, and tea the tearoom and tea garden , so gin brought into being the gin or dram shop. 10 Described variously by contemporaries as “receptacles for wretches”, “seminaries of mischief”, or “the nurseries of all . . . vice and wickedness”, these unfamiliar environments were mainly a metropolitan phenomenon, and proliferated from the early decades of the eighteenth century. A committee of Middlesex justices convened in 1726 estimated there to be six thousand gin shops in that outlying London county alone, a ratio of up to one in five houses in some parishes. 11 As the below mezzotint intimates, gin shops were far more rudimentary than the traditional inns, taverns, and alehouses that had hitherto made up England’s victualling hierarchy, and which, by the Hanoverian period, had become increasingly sophisticated and regulated under licensing laws. All that was needed to begin trading was a supply of the “pestiferous draught” (either distilled on the premises or acquired from a boutique manufacturer). Chairs and tables in these shops were kept deliberately sparse to encourage off-sales as well as “perpendicular drinking”, both guaranteeing rapid churn of a predominantly poor clientele who lacked the funds for lengthy on-site drinking sessions. 12

One spatial innovation of the gin shop was the counter or bar, an appropriation from the burgeoning retail sector. Despite conventional wisdom, these were not a feature of established drinking places, in which alcohol was ferried directly from cellars or storage rooms to customers in halls, parlours, and chambers via a battalion of hosts, drawers, pot boys, and tapsters. As the architectural historian Mark Girouard has noted, the counter was a revolutionary “time-and-motion breakthrough” that made for much more rapid and efficient service; it conferred the additional advantages of separating servers from customers, providing a surface for measuring and pouring drinks, and forming a barrier behind which drink, serving vessels, and takings could be securely stored. 13

Anonymous mezzotint titled The Gin Shop Displayed , ca. 1765 — Source .

Fluid Trajectories

As well as being vended and enjoyed within these specialised settings, gin was a promiscuous and ubiquitous substance that insinuated itself into a variety of preexisting sites and spaces. As suggested by the barmaid missing the pour in the mezzotint above, gin proved impossible to contain. 14 The “maddening drench” was incorporated into the repertoires of traditional innholders, taverners, and alehouse-keepers, especially in the provinces, and — mainly because retailers who traded primarily in commodities other than alcohol could sell gin without licence or scrutiny — was sold extensively in coffeehouses, chandleries, groceries, cookshops, pawnbroker’s premises, and tobacconists. Because takeaways and off-sales comprised an important part of the business of dram shops, gin was widely consumed in homes and private residences — such as by the sex worker and sailor in the mezzotint and etching below — and it could even be enjoyed with a haircut or shave. Etchings of gin served in barbershops (like this one ) offer a visual counterpoint to the deceased barber in Hogarth’s Gin Lane , who has been driven to the end of a noose by bankruptcy brought on by a lack of business from his bedraggled and gin-addled clientele.

Hand-coloured mezzotint titled The Last Shift , ca. 1792, which depicts a sex worker in her chamber. A small gin tankard is visible next to the washtub — Source .

George Cruikshank, Mrs Topper’s Dream , ca. 1812. In this hand-coloured etching depicting a sailor and his wife in bed, as well as coffee and tea paraphernalia, a small bottle of gin can be seen on the table — Source .

Hand-coloured 1793 etching, whose caption reads “Shave For a Penny, Hair Dres't for Two Pence, and a Glass of Gin Into the Bargain” — Source .

Like tea and saloop (a hot Ottoman drink made from powdered orchid roots), the “infernal combustible” also found itself outside in the open air; indeed, Gin Lane is a nightmarish vision of alfresco consumption. As well as being sold in dedicated shops, gin was retailed from sheds, stalls, and lean-tos in “holes and by-alleys”, was enjoyed on thoroughfares, and — like other comestibles throughout the period — was hawked on the street by mobile vendors, especially during mass entertainments such as executions. 15 The best-known depiction of this practice is Hogarth’s The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn , which features a street retailer slinging gin from a wagon at a public hanging, although a lesser-known glimpse is provided by James Gillray’s 1795 etching Copenhagen House , which shows a hawker plying gin at a crowded and raucous meeting of the London Corresponding Society. Like coffee, gin was also sold from temporary or “pop-up” venues in parks and during fairs. Frost fairs were a regular occurrence whenever the Thames froze over, and during the 1814 freeze, gin was being sold from marquees called the “Orange Boven” and the “City of Moscow”, the latter topped with a life-size effigy of the Duke of Wellington.

William Hogarth, The Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn , 1747. At the right of this engraving, a street seller dispenses glasses of gin from a cart — Source .

James Gillray, Copenhagen House , 1795. In the left-centre foreground of this hand-coloured etching, a female retailer in a headscarf sells gin at a meeting of the London Corresponding Society, a debating society that advocated for the democratic reform of parliament, inspired by the French Revolution. On the far left, three chimney sweeps, whose brass caps bear the names of their masters, add their own names to a list of well-known political rebels. The gin barrel upon which they sign reads: “Real Democratic Gin by Thelwall & Co.”, a reference to John Thelwall, the radical journalist and political reformer who co-founded the Society. The association with gin here is probably due to its low cost and ready availability to the poor, making it a democratic and accessible form of intoxication — Source .

Hand-coloured 1814 woodcut titled Frost Fair on the River Thames . In the centre, gin is being retailed from two temporary tents — Source (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

A raft of increasingly effective central government legislation between 1729 and 1751 led to a steady decline in gin drinking and its associated sites and spaces over the later decades of the eighteenth century, although the “diabolical liquor” received a second wind in the early nineteenth century, when reductions in duties engendered a resurgence of consumption and another innovative breed of space: the gin palace. Appearing from the 1820s, and experiencing their heyday the following decade (when the term was coined), these sumptuous locales were characterised by a number of architectural novelties that were again borrowed from the retail sector: the ever-present counter, but now also large glass frontages punctuated by columns or pilasters, rococo detailing and enrichments, gas lighting internally and externally, outsized vats containing gins of various stripes, and extensive textual inscription. The latter underscored long-standing associations between intoxicating spaces and textuality (drinking houses and coffeehouses were key settings for the circulation and consumption of books, newspapers, and other printed materials), and, as we will see below, the extensiveness of labels and legends in gin palaces proved something of a gift for caricaturists. Charles Dickens described a typical gin palace in 1836:

All is light and brilliancy. The hum of many voices issues from that splendid gin-shop which forms the commencement of the two streets opposite; and the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left. The interior is even gayer than the exterior. A bar of French-polished mahogany, elegantly carved, extends the whole width of the place; and there are two side-aisles of great casks, painted green and gold, enclosed within a light brass rail, and bearing such inscriptions, as ‘Old Tom, 549’; ‘Young Tom, 360’; ‘Samson, 1421’ – the figures agreeing, we presume, with ‘gallons’, understood. Beyond the bar is a lofty and spacious saloon, full of the same enticing vessels, with a gallery running round it, equally well furnished. 16

At the same time as gin was regaining momentum within these deluxe new venues, an organised temperance movement was starting to take shape. Spearheaded by coffee retailers, doctors, evangelicals, and industrialists, and animated by a fervent belief in the deleterious economic, medical, moral, and social effects of alcohol in general and spirits in particular, temperance societies campaigned vigorously against recreational drinking and ultimately for total abstention. This reforming imagination was fundamentally spatial; if, as Brian Harrison notes, their “vision of recreation [was] centred on the home” (and on the sobering intoxicant of tea), then the newfangled gin palace served as both symptom of and metonym for the corroding evils of alcohol. 17 And as well as mobilising pamphlets, maps, and songs, temperance reformers also made their case through the medium of images. 18

An 1847 print by Luke Limner comparing a traditional tavern with a modern gin palace — Source .

George Cruikshank the Teetotaler

At the vanguard of this visual and spatial temperance strategy was the graphic satirist George Cruikshank. London born and bred, and (like his near-contemporaries James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson) an inheritor of the visual tradition of Hogarth, Cruikshank was a prolific and successful commercial cartoonist who produced more than six thousand commissions for books, magazines, and pamphlets over the course of his long career. Gin and its palaces featured heavily in the vigorous and immersive scenes of London life in which he specialised. Earlier designs, such as the ones he created for Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (from which the above description is drawn) and Pierce Egan’s picaresque 1821 bestseller Life in London , are broadly benign and affectionate; the premises are attractive, and the customers for the most part convivial, healthy, and respectable. This probably reflects the central and positive role that drinking and gin palaces played in Cruikshank’s own life during this period. While he seems not to have suffered from addictive or pathological drinking, like most nineteenth-century creatives he was a habitual and excessive consumer of alcohol well-known for his love of company-keeping and public sociability.

Illustration by George Cruikshank from Pierce Egan’s Life in London , ca. 1820, which depicts protagonists Tom and Jerry in a gin palace — Source .

Left: Illustration by George Cruikshank for Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz , ca. 1836, depicting the interior of a gin palace. Right: George Cruikshank, The Gin Palace , ca. 1842 — Source: left , right .

Cruikshank had a dramatic change of science in 1847 when, at the age of fifty-five, he enthusiastically embraced teetotalism. His decision might have been in response to the negative health consequences that he was starting to experience, and was probably also informed by the fate of his father, the illustrator Isaac Cruikshank, a full-blown dipsomaniac who reputedly died of alcohol poisoning at forty-six after winning a drinking competition. 19 Whatever his motivations, from the moment of his conversion Cruikshank developed what Richard Vogler has termed “an evangelical preoccupation with the evils of alcohol”, supporting and supplying illustrations for the National Temperance Society, and developing particular disdain for gin and gin palaces, which are reconfigured in his later work. 20 In his best-known series The Bottle (1847), which charts domestic and familial disintegration over eight glyphograph plates, “creaming gin” (that “strong cordial”) infiltrates and causes chaos and heartbreak within the home, while the opening plate of his more ambitious, spatially expansive, and compelling follow-up series The Drunkard’s Children (1848) is set within a gin palace. The adult daughter of the alcoholic is framed at the centre of “that fountain which nourishes every species of crime”; she is approached by a shawled procuress, and surrounded by a ragtag clientele that includes imbibing children and babies and an inebriated disabled man. All are dwarfed by giant barrels bearing the ironic legends “Cream of the Valley” and the “Celebrated Double Gin”. Other portrayals from this era depict hopeless and helpless drunkards spilling and stumbling from gin palace frontages.

In the third plate of The Bottle by George Cruikshank, 1847, the doomed family console themselves with gin while bailiffs remove their furniture. Things get progressively worse over five subsequent plates — Source .

In the opening plate of George Cruikshank’s The Drunkard’s Children , 1848, the ill-fated offspring are depicted in a gin palace — Source .

Challenging received notions of a linear intellectual and artistic trajectory from valorisation to demonisation, Cruikshank’s most striking negative depiction of a gin palace, entitled The Gin Shop , dates from 1829, nearly twenty years before his renunciation of alcohol. Here, prefiguring his later anxieties, he imagines the gin palace as a macabre and treacherous space of death, albeit within a comic rather than social realist idiom. The etching depicts another doomed family huddled in the jaws of a literal gin-trap, encircled by morbid motifs. The gin barrels are styled as coffins, they are served by a skeleton disguised as a barkeep, and they menaced by a second skeleton holding an hourglass and spear. Like gin palaces themselves, Cruikshank characteristically deploys captions, speech bubbles, signs, and other textual devices to drive home his message. The gins are named “Kill Devil”, “Blue Ruin”, and “Deady’s Cordial”, signs point to and portend the “workhouse”, “madhouse”, “gaol”, and “gibbet”, and the skeleton grimly predicts “they have nearly had their last glass”. In a revealing double entendre, underscoring the association between gin’s pernicious effects and the malign supernatural, the “spirit vaults” contain imps dancing around a cauldron chanting an incantation.

George Cruikshank, The Gin Shop , 1829 — Source .

Notes Show Notes

• Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 499.
• On satirical prints and their makers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, see Mary Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (London: Allen Lane, 1967) and more recently Alice Loxton, Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmaking in Georgian London (London: Icon Books, 2023).
• David. T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
• George Smith, A Compleat Body of Distilling (London, 1725), 50.
• Jessica Warner, Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 2002), 2.
• James Quan Nicholls, “Gin Lane Revisited: Intoxication and Society in the Gin Epidemic”, Journal for Cultural Research 7 (2003): 129.
• Anonymous, Occasional Remarks upon the Act for Laying a Duty upon the Retailers of Spirituous Liquors etc… and for Licensing the Retailers Thereof (London, 1736), 7.
• Eliza Haywood, A Present for Women Addicted to Drinking, Adapted to All the Different Stations of Life: From a Lady of Quality to a Common Servant (London, 1750), 6.
• Anonymous, A Dissertation on Mr. Hogarth’s Six Prints, Lately Publish’d viz. Gin Lane, Beer Street, and the Four Stages of Cruelty (London, 1751), 24, 9.
• On the impact of new intoxicants on urban spaces in Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries see https://www.intoxicatingspaces.org/ .
• Peter Clark, “The ‘Mother Gin’ Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 38 (1988): 66–67.
• Geoff Brandwood, Andrew Davison, and Michael Slaughter, Licensed to Sell: The History and Heritage of the Public House (London: English Heritage, 2004), 17.
• Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 26.
• This chimes with a recent trend within drug history to focus on the fluid trajectories of intoxicants themselves rather than the static institutions in which they were retailed and consumed. For example Tyler Rainford, “Pro Bono Publico: Publicans, Punch, and Print in Eighteenth-Century London”, Cultural and Social History 20.2 (2023): 161–81.
• Adam Holden, A vindication of a pamphlet lately published, intituled The tryal of the spirits (London, 1736), 24. On hawking in this period see Charlie Taverner, Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
• Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People (Boston and New York: Books, Inc., 1894), 169–70.
• Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (Keele: Keele University Press, 1994).
• See Julia Skelly, Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919: Wasted Looks (Aldershot and Burlington: Routledge, 2014), especially chapter 2.
• Hilary and Mary Evans, The Man who Drew the Drunkard’s Daughter: The Life and Art of George Cruikshank, 1792–1878 (London: Olympic Marketing Corp., 1978), 125.
• Richard A. Vogler, Graphic Works of George Cruikshank (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), xiv.

Public Domain Works

• Wellcome Collection
• Tokyo Keizai University

Further Reading

What drives the drug trade, and how has it come to be what it is today? A global history of the acquisition of progressively more potent means of altering ordinary waking consciousness, this book is the first to provide the big picture of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet’s psychoactive resources, from tea and kola to opiates and amphetamines.

Set against a backdrop of royal madness, political intrigue, the birth of modern celebrity, French revolution, American independence and the Napoleonic Wars, Uproar! follows Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, and Isaac Cruikshank as they lampoon those in power, from the Prince Regent to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Their prints and illustrations deconstruct the political and social landscape with surreal and razor-sharp wit, as the three men vie with each other to create the most iconic images of the day.

Jessica Warner looks at the impact of “mother gin” from personal, political, and sexual perspectives. She draws on hundreds of primary sources, from Defoe to Dr. Johnson, guiding us through squalid back rooms, streets thronged with hawkers, raging mobs, and the halls of Parliament. The result is a timely, irreverent, utterly engrossing look at a city and a drug — and a drug scare — that helped shape our contemporary views of pleasure, consumption, and public morality.

The Public Domain Review receives a small percentage commission from sales made via the links to Bookshop.org (10%) and Amazon (4.5%). Thanks for supporting the project! For more recommended books, see all our “ Further Reading ” books, and browse our dedicated Bookshop.org stores for US and UK readers.

Dr James Brown is currently Knowledge Exchange Programme Manager at the University of Sheffield. He has a background in academic history, specialising in cultures of drinking and intoxication in early modern England, and was previously Research Associate on and Project Manager of the HERA-funded research project Intoxicating Spaces: The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe, 1600-1850 . He is also interested in the digital humanities; project and programme management; and public engagement, knowledge exchange, and impact.

The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

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Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Alcohol Abuse — The Impact of Alcohol Abuse: Causes, Effects, and Solutions

The Impact of Alcohol Abuse: Causes, Effects, and Solutions

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Effects of Alcohol Consumption Essay

Introduction, nursing intervention.

Alcohol consumption can have various effects on the people who consume it. The effects may be social, psychological, physiological and medical. Some alcoholic brands (like wine) may have positive effects on our health while others (like spirits) may have negative effects. The duration in which a person consumes alcohol determines the intensity of the negative effects of alcohol on the person. One negative effect of alcohol is the damage of body organs like the liver and the colon, when consumed for a long period of time (Cooper, 2000).

Alcohol is categorized as a depressant due to its ability to slow down the nervous system thereby reducing sensitivity to pain through inducement of sleep like feeling. Some of the immediate impacts of alcohol misuse include lack or loss of one’s awareness, distortion of reality, loss of coordination of the brain activities and one’s motor skills (Toppness, 2011). When used for a long time, it leads to addiction, as well as social and economic irresponsibilities by the addicted individuals (Toppness, 2011).

Research has shown that alcohol consumption is a risk factor to colon cancer. However, the type of alcohol brand matters. While wine may have positive impacts in preventing colon cancer, hard liquor like spirits have been found to increase the chances of alcoholics developing colon cancer. Prolonged alcohol consumption also leads to colon irritation, which in turn leads to diarrhoea and constipation (Toppness, 2011). This can make the individuals lose their appetite and become malnourished. Such individuals may end up being socially and economically irresponsible, which may further lead to depression. The depressed individuals become prone to suicide because their thinking and reasoning becomes impaired, and to them, life loses meaning.

Patients who are addicted to alcohol consumption need to be shown love and care not rebuke and contempt. This is one aspect of the nursing profession and other professions like social work. We should show them love and care through talking to them in a courteous manner, and showing them that they are able to come out of their situation.

Many alcohol addicts have their symptoms as adaptive. This means that they develop or acquire some behaviour which helps them cope with the problems they are facing; one such behaviour is alcohol consumption, which later develops into alcohol misuse or abuse. For example, some may assume or think that other people hate them because they are poor or are of low social status. This is an external pressure to them, and in order for them to safeguard their ego, they engage in alcohol consumption in order to cope in staying with the people who hate them. Our intervention should therefore be centred on behaviour and attitude change.

We should show them that alcohol consumption is not the solution to their problems and help them gain the courage to face life the way it is. We should help them acquire new behaviours which are not depended on alcohol. For instance, they could be helped to boost their people’s skills, their confidence as well as improve on their hygiene, which would boost their self-esteem. These interventions could be done in a community setting or at their homes. In severe cases of addiction, they should be taken to rehabilitation, where they could be helped to recover from withdrawal symptoms.

Even though alcohol can have many negative effects on our bodies, it is a good component of our diet when used properly in the right quantities and frequencies. For instance, it makes our meals complete apart from being used as a social drink. Alcohol consumption therefore becomes dangerous to us and our bodies when we misuse it. Alcohol consumption is regarded as a risk factor in causing colon cancer because it causes diarrhoea and inflammation of the colon. The link is however not clearly established and therefore the need for more research to establish the relationship between alcohol consumption and colon cancer (Hales, 2008).

Cooper, D.B. (2000). Alcohol Use. Abingdon OX14 1AA: Radcliffe Publishing.

Hales, D. (2008). An Invitation to Health. New York: Cengage Learning.

Toppness, H. (2011). Alcohol Effects on the Colon. Web.

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Negative Effects of Alcohol Essay, with Outline

Published by gudwriter on January 4, 2021 January 4, 2021

Effects of Alcoholism Essay Outline

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Thesis: Although praised by many as a way to pass time and relax, alcohol can affect an individually financially, socially, and psychologically.

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Financial Impact

• Alcohol drinkers may suffer other economic consequences such as low wages, loss of employment, increased medical expenses, and legal expenses.
• In some countries, alcoholics lose their eligibility for loans.
• In Cameroon, the cost of a single beer is more than the minimum daily wage of most individuals.
• In India and Malaysia, alcoholics are faced with challenges such as debt, illnesses, and injuries.
• Alcohol is closely related to poverty.

Social Impact

• The people that are most affected by alcoholism are the immediate family members.
• Impairment of an individual’s performance as a parent, partner and how he or she contributes to the normal functioning of a household.
• Heavy drinkers are known to have impaired judgement that can lead to one becoming violent.
• The social impact of alcoholism can be related to its physical effects.
• For example, for a heavily drinking mother, an unborn child may suffer from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. Read on essays examples on topics such as abortion .
• Parental drinking may lead to child abuse among other negative consequences on a child .

Psychological Impact

• One of the most significant psychological impact is an increase in suicidal tendencies.
• Alcohol has a negative impact on the brain explained through a form of liver damage referred to as hepatic encephalopathy.
• The effects of hepatic encephalopathy includes; altered sleep pattern, changes in mood and personality, depression, anxiety and other psychiatric conditions.
• There are also cognitive effects such as a reduction in attention and issues with coordination.

Effects of Drinking Alcohol

Alcoholism is a common problem in many communities. It is persistent in many societies since alcohol consumption is considered as an attractive leisure activity by many. While this may be and actually is the case, alcohol has a negative impact on health. Its effects also often spill over to people who do not consume it when it gets to a level of addiction whereby many have to turn to relatives and loved ones to source for money with which to sustain their wasteful spending on alcoholism. Although praised by many as a way to pass time and relax, alcohol can affect an individual financially, socially, and psychologically.

The financial impact of alcohol is significant especially to the poor. In any session of alcohol consumption, heavy drinkers tend to spend a lot. Sometimes, alcohol drinkers may suffer other economic consequences such as low wages, loss of employment, increased medical expenses, and legal expenses. In some countries, alcoholics lose their eligibility for loans. In Sri Lanka for instance, a report revealed that at least 7% of men spent much on alcohol than they actually earned. In Cameroon, the cost of a single beer is more than the minimum daily wage of most individuals (Tamfuh, 2016). In India and Malaysia, alcoholics are faced with such serious challenges as debt, illnesses, and injuries (Armitage et al., 2015). Exacerbation of poverty and burden on women is another common occurrence facing most alcoholics. A majority of alcoholic men are faced with the constant need to source for extra income through such activities as stealing to sustain their behavior of alcoholism. In the long-run, their families end up in unimaginable debts and suffering.

Here, the people that are most affected by alcoholism are the immediate family members. It is proven that drinking too much alcohol impairs an individual’s performance as a parent and partner, and how he or she contributes to the normal functioning of a household. The situation can have a long lasting impact on children and partners, and is therefore a very serious one. For instance, heavy drinkers are known to have impaired judgment that can lead to them becoming violent (Kaufmann et al., 2014). Such an individual might turn against their partner or children and when this happens, it could have far-reaching effects on the lives of spouses and children.

The social impact of alcoholism can also be related to its physical effects. For example, for a heavily drinking mother, an unborn child may suffer from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder . After birth, parental drinking may lead to child abuse among other negative consequences on a child. The child may end up suffering socially, psychologically, and economically.

There are numerous psychological effects of alcoholism . One of the most significant effect in this respect is an increase in suicidal tendencies whereby studies have shown that at least 15% of alcoholics end up committing suicide. In the same breadth, alcohol has a negative impact on the brain, explained through a form of liver damage referred to as hepatic encephalopathy. It is a disease that affects the normal functioning of the brain when the liver cannot perform its functions well. There are several psychological effects associated with this disease. Some of these effects include altered sleep patterns, changes in mood and personality, depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric conditions (Vilstrup et al., 2014). There are also cognitive effects such as a reduction in attention and issues with coordination.

Undoubtedly, alcoholism has an adverse impact on the financial, social, and psychological environment of the victim. The worst scenario is that alcoholism tends to affect others such as the immediate family members. It is a problem that has the potential to destroy families if not well checked. It can destroy the lives of children and as well interfere with the wellbeing of spouses of alcoholics. It is especially concerning that it is a problem that affects both men and women. In this respect, there is need to find ways through which the problem of alcoholism may be comprehensively addressed.

Armitage, C. J., Panagioti, M., Rahim, W. A., Rowe, R., & O’Connor, R. C. (2015). Completed suicides and self-harm in Malaysia: a systematic review.  General hospital psychiatry ,  37 (2), 153-165.

Kaufmann, V. G., O’farrell, T. J., Murphy, C. M., Murphy, M. M., & Muchowski, P. (2014). Alcohol consumption and partner violence among women entering substance use disorder treatment.  Psychology of Addictive Behaviors ,  28 (2), 313.

Tamfuh, W. Y. (2016). Drugs and drug control in Cameroon.  Pan-African Issues in Drugs and Drug Control: An International Perspective , 17.

Vilstrup, H., Amodio, P., Bajaj, J., Cordoba, J., Ferenci, P., Mullen, K. D., … & Wong, P. (2014). Hepatic encephalopathy in chronic liver disease: 2014 practice guideline by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the European Association for the Study of the Liver.  Hepatology ,  60 (2), 715-735.

Undoubtedly, alcoholism has an adverse impact on the financial, social and psychological environment of the victim. The worst scenario is that alcoholism tends to affect others such as the immediate family members.

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National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)

Alcohol Awareness Month: Raising Awareness about the Dangers of Alcohol Use Among Teens

March 27, 2024

April is Alcohol Awareness Month, an opportunity to update your knowledge about the adverse effects of alcohol misuse on health and society. It is also a good time to talk to teens about drinking and to equip them with the knowledge to handle situations involving alcohol. Even teens who would not normally be tempted to drink alcohol may be drawn in by certain social situations, so don’t assume they have all the facts they need to resist peer pressure. Parents and trusted adults can play a meaningful role in shaping youth’s attitudes toward drinking.

Alcohol-related problems continue to take a heavy toll on individuals, families, and communities. Researchers estimate that each year there are more than 178,000 alcohol-related deaths, making alcohol a leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Alcohol is a significant factor in the deaths of people younger than age 21 in the United States. This includes deaths from motor vehicle crashes, homicides, alcohol overdoses, falls, burns, drownings, and suicides. Research indicates that alcohol misuse during the teenage years can interfere with normal adolescent brain development. Alcohol use during adolescence also significantly increases the risk of developing alcohol use disorder later in life, and the earlier a teen starts, the higher the risk. In addition, more than 200 disease and injury-related conditions are associated with alcohol misuse.

Here are some resources from NIAAA to inform teens and their parents—as well as people such as educators, coaches, and faith group leaders who work with teens—about the detrimental health effects of underage alcohol use:

• Facts About Teen Drinking : Designed for teens, this website contains in-depth information about how alcohol affects health, how to identify signs of an alcohol problem, and how to get help.
• NIAAA for Middle School : This website contains interactive activities to help parents, caregivers, and teachers introduce and reinforce key messages about peer pressure, resistance skills, and other important topics related to underage drinking.
• Alcohol and Your Brain: A Virtual Reality Experience : This educational experience shares age-appropriate messages through engaging visuals, informative billboards, and narration.
• Kahoot! quiz about underage drinking : This quiz can be taken at home or in the classroom to help teens gain a better understanding of underage drinking. Topics covered in the quiz are negative health consequences associated with drinking, signs of an alcohol problem, and how to find support.

More NIAAA resources about drinking during adolescence are available on our underage drinking landing page , including resources for talking to kids about alcohol. Parents and other adults can make a difference in helping teens make the right decisions when it comes to alcohol and preventing underage drinking. Having conversations with them about alcohol is a strong start. Another strong start is to understand your key function as a role model when it comes to alcohol. Adolescents are less likely to drink heavily when the adults in their life demonstrate responsible behavior regarding their own alcohol use and when they live in homes where parents/guardians have specific rules against drinking at a young age.

In addition, for adults, the Rethinking Drinking website features interactive calculators as well as tips and strategies to cut down or quit drinking. The Alcohol Treatment Navigator walks individuals through the process of finding treatment options and recovery resources. Whether you are seeking more information about what alcohol use disorder is, are thinking about cutting back on alcohol, are a parent looking for information about how to talk to your child about alcohol, or a health care professional looking for how to help patients with alcohol-related problems, NIAAA can help.

Best wishes, George F. Koob, Ph.D. NIAAA Director

Need Help for an Alcohol Problem?

If you’re having an emergency, call 911. If you are having suicidal thoughts, call 911, go to the nearest emergency room or call the toll-free, 24-hour  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline  at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) to help you through this difficult time.

The  NIAAA Alcohol Treatment Navigator  can help you recognize and find high quality treatment for alcohol use disorder. If you drink excessively, seek medical help to plan a safe recovery as sudden abstinence can be life threatening. NIAAA’s  Rethinking Drinking  can help you assess your drinking habits and provides information to help you cut back or stop drinking.

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The War at Stanford

I didn’t know that college would be a factory of unreason.

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ne of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.

Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.

Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free speech culture

Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.

“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”

“W e’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement , he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.

This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.

Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence .

The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.

The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.

Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”

Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”

The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”

Z ionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combatting anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

S aller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Let the activists have their loathsome rallies

When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”

But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.

Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.

“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.

In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”

We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).

So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.

Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.

“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”

Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.

When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”

He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”

“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.

By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.

P eople tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.

Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?

Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.

It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.

Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.

At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”

The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.

I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.

I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.

David Frum: There is no right to bully and harass

I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.

But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”

Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.

F or so long , Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.

Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.

The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.

A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.

Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)

When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”

That didn’t work.

About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”

In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.

The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Then we are enemies.”