Susan Cheever - Drinking in America: Our Secret History

T he Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer. Their legal charter from King James was for a grant of land in Northern Virginia, but instead they anchored illegally and carved their first community from the sand, laying the foundation of the American character: flinty, rebellious, and inspired by adversity.

Since the beginning, drinking and taverns have been as much a part of American life as churches and preachers, or elections and politics. The interesting truth, untaught in most schools and unacknowledged in most written history, is that a glass of beer, a bottle of rum, a keg of hard cider, a flask of whiskey, or even a dry martini was often the silent, powerful third party to many decisions that shaped the American story from the seventeenth century to the present.

Like the Massachusetts climate with its steamy summers and icy winters, the American character is subject to wild extremes. This is true with our relation to the natural world and true with our connection to drinking. At times, we dont seem to be able to moderate our drinking. At other times we blame it for everything. We love it or we hate it. It is our big solution and it is our big problem. In some decades we banned alcohol, and in others we drank so much that foreign visitors were astonished. I am sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink, wrote Frederick Marryat in the nineteenth century.

Every century, our drinking pendulumthe radical change in our relationship to alcoholswings. In the 1830s we were the drunkest country in the world. By 1930 we had outlawed drinking entirely, with disastrous results. The swings accelerated after prohibitionin the 1950s and 60s we were again awash in alcohol. Although in the twenty-first century there are more laws and more stringent social controls on drinking than there have ever been in our history, we are drinking enough to make alcoholism a significant public health problem.

In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control issued a scathing summation of the damage drinking does in the United States.

Drinking is a cherished American customa way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. It brings people together. It makes social connection easy. It loosens inhibitions. Alcohol has immediate and profound effects on behavior, writes Dr. James Milam in his classic study Under the Influence. At low doses, alcohol stimulates the brain cells, and the drinker feels happy, talkative, energetic, and euphoric. After one or two drinks, the normal drinker may experience some improvement in thought and performance. This is the alcoholic sweet spot, and its looseness and clarity have been woven into the fabric of American history. The American Revolution, the winning of the Civil War, and the great burst of creativity in American literature in the twentieth century were all enhanced by drinking.

Americans are also well acquainted with the dark side of drinking. After several drinks, the normal drinker may begin to show signs of intoxication, Dr. Milam writes of the sedative and toxic effects that occur when the drinker keeps on drinking. He may become emotionally demonstrative, expressing great joy, sadness, or anger. He may also begin to show signs of motor incoordination, staggering slightly when he walks, knocking his drink over as he leaves the table, or slurring his words. If he continues to drink, his vision may blur, and his emotions, thoughts and judgment may become noticeably disordered.

When does drinking become more than just a little harmless enjoyment? In history and in personal life, drinking has to be judged by its effectsnot by the quantity imbibed or the attitudes of the surrounding culture. Alcoholism is a harsh diagnosis to make, and for most of our history this damning word was not used. The terms alcoholism and alcoholic were not even coined until the 1840s, and didnt become common until the temperance movements of the 1890s. Before then drunks were just drunks and drinking too much was called by many names, most of them picturesque. According to one source, Benjamin Franklins Drinkers Dictionary, some synonyms for drunk can be: afflicted, pissd in the brook, had a thump over the head with Sampsons jawbone, cherry merry, hammerish, haunted with evil spirits, moon-eyd, nimptopsical, and double-tongud.

We know much more about alcoholism than we did just fifty years ago. Science and our modern temperance movements have pushed forward in defining both the brain chemistry and the social behavior of alcoholics. Alcohol creates what the scientists call a hedonistic highway in the brain of an alcoholic, so that the body is electrified with pleasure when alcohol is first imbibed. Soon it takes more and more alcohol to produce the same pleasure. After a while it takes a damaging amount of alcohol to produce what was once a normal state of being.

We now know that alcoholism has a genetic component and that it is passed from generation to generation within families. Sometimes it skips a generation or surfaces as an eating disorder, a gambling problem, or another addiction. What baffled eighteenth-century first lady Abigail Adams, who watched her brother waste his life through drinking, and was then heartbroken to see two of her sons and two of her grandsons die of drinking, makes sense to us now.

Alcohol also has an environmental component. People raised in societies where liquor is banned are less likely to drink as much as people raised in societies where liquor is freely imbibed and used as medication, mood elevator, social lubricant, and inspiration. Richard Nixon, raised in a nondrinking Quaker household, did not drink until he was an adult. He learned to drink in the Navy, and although he never drank very much, the effects of those drinks were catastrophic.

Alcoholism is not a measure of how much someone drinks but rather a measure of the effect the drinking has. Some drinkersPresident Nixon is a good examplehave a low tolerance for alcohol. Others have a high tolerance. Although the law judges drinking entirely on quantitya breathalyzer measures only how much alcohol has been imbibedwhether or not a drinker is impaired is not predictable by quantity. The old-fashioned police field test for driving while intoxicatedcan you walk in a straight line and turn on command, can you stand on one leg, can you sustain a horizontal gazeis actually a more accurate measure than blood alcohol content (BAC). Many drinkers can appear to be unaffected by a great deal of alcohol, while others are unable to walk straight after a few glasses of wine.