Alcoholism in America

Contents

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Preface

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pp. ix-xvii

There is a personal story behind my choosing to study the history of alcoholism, but it does not involve alcohol. At times I have wished that I had a more direct connection, rationalizing that I might have finished the book earlier had I been propelled by the immediacy of the problem in my own life. But the truth is that the more I have learned about the history of alcoholism—and its present state—the more...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xix-xxiii

Introduction

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pp. 1-24

1 Disease Concept(s) of Inebriety

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pp. 25-62

On the eve of the U.S. Centennial, the American Medical Association convened in Philadelphia, where founder of the American temperance movement Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence. It was 6 June 1876, and members of the AMA Section on Public Hygiene and State Medicine gathered at the Horticultural Hall of the Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park to discuss, among...

2 Cultural Framing of Inebriety

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pp. 63-91

The physicians who described habitual drunkenness in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era wrote about it in cultural as well as medical terms. They saw inebriety as a disease of modern civilization, much as George Miller Beard had described neurasthenia or modern nervousness. Modern industrial society’s frenzied pace, urbanization, immigration, and changing gender roles all posed obstacles to sobriety...

3 Institutional Solutions for Inebriety

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pp. 92-121

In mid-September 1913, reformed inebriate Thomas Rand returned to New York City from a three-day excursion to Massachusetts. On his trip, Rand had stopped in to see his remaining friends and staff members at the state inebriate hospital in Foxborough. He had also visited his old hometown of Randolph. Upon his return to Manhattan, Rand penned a letter to hospital superintendent Irwin Neff...

4 Public Inebriate Hospitals and Farm Colonies

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pp. 122-146

New York City, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Minnesota all chartered hospitals and farm colonies for inebriates. In California, however, a rapidly growing population with no shortage of mentally ill citizens led the board of trustees of the new Southern California State Asylum for Inebriates and Insane to change the institution’s charter to accommodate only the insane even before the facility...

5 The “Foxborough Experiment”

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pp. 147-195

On the sixth of February 1893, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts opened its Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates at Foxborough. Situated on eighty-six acres of farmland just twenty-five miles southwest of Boston, this new medical facility was to provide a more humane and effective alternative to the unsatisfactory solutions already in place for the Bay State’s habitual drunkards: the jail and the...

6 Building a Boozatorium

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pp. 196-225

From his room in the State Hospital for Inebriates at Knoxville, businessman and patient Ed Harris penned his request for “parole” to Iowa governor William Harding. It was January 1917, and Harris, who had spent several weeks in the state “jaghouse,” claimed to have “finished taking the treatment.” As evidence for his rapid...

7 On the Vice and Disease of Inebriety

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pp. 226-272

Throughout the nineteenth century, scores of habitual drunkards wrote about their experiences with alcohol and their return to sobriety through various means. Published as temperance tracts, these narratives constituted a popular literary genre. As Elaine Parsons recently observed, “All Americans, not just those who particularly cared about temperance reform, knew the standard generic elements of the story of the drunkard’s...

Conclusion

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pp. 273-291

In 1945, a quarter of a century after the Norfolk State Hospital had closed its doors and a dozen years after the repeal of national Prohibition, the Special Commission to Investigate the Problem of Drunkenness in Massachusetts reported: “It may seem ironical that at the conclusion of this study our thoughts and recommendations finally have become crystallized along the same general trends which repeatedly have...

Notes

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pp. 292-346

Index

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pp. 347-357