The Saloon and the Mission: Addiction, Conversion, and the Politics of Redemption in American Culture

3. The Varieties of Conversion Polemic

[ 83 ] 3 The Varieties of Conversion Polemic E If the State, burdened and shackled by its horde of outcasts and sinners , would march freely and efficiently to its goal, it must be at the hands of religion that relief is sought. —Harold Begbie, Twice-Born Men . . . A Footnote in Narrative to Professor William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1909) James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be well . . . in order to escape the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason. . . . Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget. —Jack London, John Barleycorn (1913) The drunkards reformed at evangelical rescue missions in the late nineteenth century anchored their conversion stories to pragmatic needs and oriented them toward egalitarian ends, and in doing so created a flexible form for applying addiction-redemption language to all manner of social purposes. But this reformist structure notwithstanding, in both performance and print, the original stories remained products of the sentimental culture of the nineteenth century; their sensational low-life scenes, dramatic plot reversals, and triumphant piety exhibit as much. The genre’s popular appeal and plausibility as nonfiction depended on the contemporary prevalence of these devices. How, then, did the drunkard’s conversion fare in the early twentieth century, an era in which cultural tastes became more skeptical, medical science made strong claims on behavioral health, and professional expertise became the currency of moral reform? The broad answer is a central argument of this book: that the drunkard’s Chapter 3 [ 84 ] conversion was adapted to serve various new uses, in the process becoming a master narrative of addiction discourse in twentieth-century culture. This legacy was not just a broad structural outline. Rather, the new genres conserved specific conventions for asserting the relationship between personal experiences and larger religious, philosophical, and political truths, redeploying them on behalf of new ideas and in response to new social circumstances . But how did these meaning-making elements themselves survive dramatic contextual change? How could a self-described skeptic like Bill Wilson credibly claim to have been “saved” from alcoholic compulsion in 1934 by roughly the same kind of conversion experienced by Bible-thumper Billy Sunday in 1887?1 One important reason for the form’s endurance was that psychologists , owners of the modern, scientific discipline claiming epistemological authority over the nature of subjective experience, gave a nearly unqualified endorsement to the efficacy of spiritual conversion as a cure for alcoholism. At the turn of the century, when most commercial inebriety treatments still involved peddling various chemical elixirs, William James cited a “medical man” to the effect that “the only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania.”2 Following the lead of some of his peers in academic psychology as well as Christian and New Thought therapy, James devoted considerable attention to showing how religious awakening answered the problem of compulsive habit. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James used “the Jerry McAuley Water Street Mission” as a byword and, indirectly, a source-base, to delineate what seemed the unique practical benefits of religious transformation. Converted drunkards, their religious advisers, and even their doctors subsequently drew on James’s intellectual respect to justify what risked appearing as an atavistic response to what was increasingly defined as a medical condition. More than thirty years later, Wilson, for example, was not willing to admit that he had had a conversion experience without making reference to James’s book.3 James, his scholarly peers, and their legatees essentially vouched for the drunkard’s conversion in the modern world. George Santayana was prescient, as well as contemptuous, when shortly after the publication of Varieties he greeted his Harvard colleague by exclaiming, “You have done the religious slumming for all time!”4 James and his fellow scholars’ stated interest was in religious fervor more than in alcoholic madness, but they saw in the latter a concrete problem of mind and body that the spiritual frame not only fit but seemed genuinely to solve. Psychologists at the turn of the century thus put great stock [ 85 ] The Varieties of Conversion Polemic in religion’s effectiveness in curing inebriety, and they did so in a manner that endowed the conversion phenomenon with an aura of empirical facticity .5 As seekers after the limit-cases of interior experience, they did not privilege quiet, intellectual forms of conversion but cast their...