Dutch Courage: A History
of Booze in America

(continued)

By Joan Schonbeck

Two men little affected by Prohibition had been William Griffith Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith. Wilson was one of the "bright young men" of Wall Street in the early '20s. For people of his social set, obtaining booze was no problem. Dr. Smith didn't have much trouble either. He simply wrote himself prescriptions. Most of Wilson's drinking career occurred during Prohibition, and Smith's excesses with drink cost him his health and practice during those same years. Both men knew, by 1933, that continued drinking could only bring them death or insanity.

In December 1934, Bill Wilson experienced a miracle. During his third stay at a Brooklyn hospital to "dry out," he again experienced terrible depression. But this time it was followed by what he forever afterward called a "Spiritual Experience." He left the hospital convinced that the desire to drink had left him — FOREVER! But six months later, in an Akron, Ohio, hotel lobby, that conviction was severely shaken as he listened to the clink of ice cubes against glasses and the laughter of customers in the hotel's nearby bar.

The odds of two transplanted Vermonters being brought together in Akron, Ohio, through a phone call to a clergyman Wilson didn't know, and then going on to found Alcoholics Anonymous, are beyond calculation. Yet it happened. The minister, whose name Wilson found in the hotel directory, somehow listened and understood, and suggested he call Henrietta Sieberling, daughter-in-law of the owner of Goodyear Rubber Corporation. It was she who also listened and understood, and made the necessary arrangements for him to meet her good friend, Dr. Robert Smith. From that fateful meeting, Wilson and Smith went on to found Alcoholics Anonymous, destined to have a worldwide effect on the treatment of alcoholism. It would also have a more lasting and powerful impact on how Americans viewed booze than anything else that had come before. The love affair with "John Barleycorn" wasn't over, but it would never again be quite the same.

AA turned fifty years old with martini lunches and clandestine teen keg parties still part of the fabric of our society. But there was a new awareness that alcohol is a drug, and people who abuse it addicts. Non-alcoholic beers and wines appeared, and Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign targeted alcohol equally with other abused substances. Increasing numbers of celebrities from sports, entertainment and literature — people like Liza Minelli, Dodgers pitcher Bob Welch, and writer Elmore Leonard, to name a few — went public with their addiction and recovery and made it more socially acceptable to admit to having a problem and getting help. "Detoxes" became big business in the healthcare industry. Between 1978 and 1984, in-patient for-profit substance abuse treatment programs increased a whopping 382%!

During the '80s, another, darker facet of "John Barleycorn's" persona was beginning to anger many Americans: its ability to kill. The following figures, culled from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration between 1986 and 1988, give a glimpse of its murderous record. Someone died in an alcohol-related crash every 22 minutes in those years. Add to this the injured, and in one year 560,000 people were killed or injured by drunk driving — more than one per minute! Drunk driving remains the most frequently committed crime in America today, according to the FBI, and nearly half (41%) of all fatal crashes involve a drunk driver.

Perhaps the most tragic part of the figures is the realization of who "Dutch Courage" is killing and injuring. Fifty-four percent of all children killed in automobile accidents were driving with a drunken parent. Ninety-two percent of all high-school seniors have used alcohol (as opposed to 47% who have used marijuana or 12% who have used cocaine). There are 28 million children of alcoholics in the United States today, one-quarter of whom are under the age of eighteen. Alcohol abuse is involved in 50% of all spousal abuse cases, 49% of all murders, 68% of manslaughter cases, 62% of assaults, 52% of rapes, and 38% of child abuse fatalities. Cirrhosis of the liver, often caused by excessive alcohol use, is the ninth leading cause of death in the United States. *

In 1980, in California, Candy Lightner's fourteen-year-old daughter was run over and killed by a drunk driver. From the figures, clearly she wasn't the only one to lose a child that way. But what Lightner did with her anger and grief is part of the change in attitude that's spanning the country. She formed MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Unlike Carry Nation's WCTU ladies, MADD's primary focus has been helping victims, the families who are put through this ordeal. They have been instrumental in getting laws changed, in doing away with the tacit approval drunk driving has always enjoyed here in America. A companion group, SADD, Students Against Drunk Driving, began in Marlborough, Massachusetts, in 1984.

It's been part of us for so long! "Dutch Courage" accompanied us on every step we took across America, was with us to witness every event that makes up our history. Sometimes we truly believed it gave us courage — and maybe it did. Sometimes it enlivened our celebrations, made us feel happy or confident. Equally, it created poverty and crime, destroyed families, and even killed us. But no other nation on earth, from alcohol-banning Muslim theocracies to those who have virtually no laws against it, have ever embraced and tussled with booze as we have. All the serious efforts to alter behavior around alcohol — from the Washingtonians to Alcoholics Anonymous to Mothers Against Drunk Driving — have their roots planted deeply here in the United States. And there are more chapters yet to be written.

*National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Sixth Special Report to Congress on Alcohol and Health, 1987.