CHAPTER TWO OUT OF THE GUTTER The Methodist Church on Greene Street in New York City was packed on the wintry evening of March 23, 1841. New Yorkers had been hearing reports from Baltimore that a group of drunks had gotten themselves sober and launched a movement to save the lives of alcoholics. The reformed drunks called themselves Washingtonians to identify their struggle against the slavery of alcohol with the nation''s war of liberation from British despotism. There was some trepidation among New York temperance advocates about inviting even sober drunks to address one of their meetings. They feared that tales of debauchery would offend the middle class audience. But the full pews of the church revealed the enormous curiosity to hear them tell their stories. John H.W.
Hawkins, an unemployed hatter who had been sober less than a year, was the first to speak. Hawkins, who was 43, would become the Washingtonians'' greatest orator, but he had made his first speech only a few weeks earlier. While his nose was too large for a handsome man, he had large expressive eyes and dark bushy eyebrows. As he spoke in the Greene Street church, his audience was struck by the simplicity and sincerity with which he told the story of his terrible degradation and nearly miraculous recovery. They were also moved by his passionate commitment to saving the lives of alcoholics by getting them to sign a pledge not to drink alcoholic beverages. "If there is a man on earth who deserves the sympathy of the world it is the poor drunkard," Hawkins said. "He is poisoned, degraded, cast out, knows not what to do, and must be helped or he is lost.I feel for drunkards.
I want them to come and sign the pledge and be saved."1 Suddenly, Hawkins was interrupted by a voice from the gallery. "Can I be saved?" a man asked. "I am a poor drunkard. I would give the world if I was as you." "Yes, there is, my friend," Hawkins replied. "Come down and sign the pledge, and you will be a man. Come down and I will meet you, and we will take you by the hand.
" A minister who was present later described the scene for William George Hawkins, John''s son and biographer. There was silence as the man made his way to the stairs and began to descend. "Your father sprang from the stand, and, followed, by others, met the poor man literally half way, escorted him to the desk, and guided his hand as he signed his name," the minister wrote. ".[T]hen such a shout broke forth from the friends of temperance as must have reached the angels above."2 More drunks now rose and came forward-"five or six others of this miserable class.and some 30 or 40 others, well known as hard drinkers and drunkards," the Rev. John Marsh, secretary of the American Temperance Union, reported.
News of the Greene Street meeting soon spread through the city. The Washingtonians addressed "immense meetings" in the largest churches every night for the next two weeks. Three thousand people heard them at a meeting in City Hall Park. More than 2,500 signed the Washingtonian pledge. "The victory was now gained," Marsh said. "The work of redemption among the poor drunkards had commenced."3 The Washingtonians were an exuberant expression of America''s most optimistic age. The ideas of the European Enlightenment were expressed in the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by God with inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The American Revolution did not produce a democracy immediately, but in the following decades the advocates of rule by the high born and well educated lost ground to those who believed that the common man should govern. In 1828, universal manhood suffrage helped elect President Andrew Jackson. The United States was growing rapidly, both economically and geographically, and experiencing its first great wave of immigrants. In such a dynamic society, most Americans agreed that change was a good thing. Changes in American religion contributed strongly to this dynamism. For more than a century, Protestant ministers had endeavored to convince believers that they were naturally sinful and that most men were destined for Hell. But this bleak philosophy was challenged by a series of revivals that were sweeping the country. The sermons preached by the revivalists were no less frightening in evoking the horrors of damnation.
Before large meetings, often held out of doors to accommodate the crowds, they did their best to create an emotional response that caused people to scream, fall to the floor, jerk uncontrollably, even bark like dogs. But the revivalists offered their listeners the promise of salvation. If they let God enter their hearts, they would shed their evil nature and become new, guaranteeing eternal life. As Americans became increasingly hopeful about improving their condition, they embraced reform. By the 1830s, they acknowledged that they confronted many problems. Rapid growth had made many men rich, but it had also created a growing class of impoverished workers who had nowhere to turn during the frequent recessions. Crime was a growing threat to social order. Yet Americans believed in progress.
If man was essentially good, then social problems were not inevitable. "It is to the defects of our social organization.that we chiefly owe the increase of evil doers," declared Dorothea Dix, a pioneer in seeking more humane treatment for the mentally ill. She was joined by a generation of reformers who sought to improve conditions through education, universal peace, prison reform, equal rights for women and the end of slavery.4 It was in this period of hopefulness that the movement to curb the consumption of liquor emerged. In 1808, as Handsome Lake worked to spread sobriety among the Iroquois in western New York, a doctor and a minister started the first temperance society in the small town of Moreau in eastern New York. The first state temperance organization, the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, was organized a few years later. The meaning of "temperance" would evolve in the following decades.
At first, it meant abstinence from rum, whiskey and other distilled liquors. Many who signed a temperance pledge continued to enjoy their glass of beer or wine in good conscience. The predominant role that the clergy would play in the temperance movement throughout its history is apparent in the fact that the Massachusetts society addressed itself to the problems of Sabbath-breaking and profanity as well a drinking whiskey. The movement grew rapidly after the launch of a national organization, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, which soon included 1,000 local temperance groups with a membership of 100,000. In 1835, the American Temperance Society claimed more than two million people had signed pledges promising that they would not drink distilled liquor, forcing 4,000 distilleries to close. Alcohol consumption fell from seven gallons per person in 1830 to slightly more than three gallons in 1840, the biggest decline in a ten-year period in American history. Their amazing success persuaded the leaders of the temperance movement that the goal of national sobriety was within reach. But it stalled when a split developed between those who opposed only hard liquor and "teetotalers" demanding total abstinence.
Worried temperance leaders saw the emergence of the Washingtonians as almost miraculous. For centuries it had been assumed that little could be done to help alcoholics, and the temperance movement directed its energy to preventing the creation of new drunkards, rather than the reclamation of those who were afflicted. The Rev. Justin Edwards, a founder of the American Temperance Society, explained: We are at present fast hold of a project for making all people in this country, and in all other countries, temperate; or rather, a plan to induce those who are now temperate to continue so. Then, as all who are intemperate will soon be dead, the earth will be eased of an amazing evil. Not all temperance leaders were so pessimistic about the possibility of recovery. One of them, Gerritt Smith, presented case studies of how temperance had improved the lives of 38 of his neighbors in a small town in upstate New York, including men and women who were certainly alcoholic.5 But no one expected to see the day when an alcoholic like John Hawkins would step on a public stage and proclaim his intention to save other drunks.
Hawkins certainly never expected it. He had been struggling with alcoholism for half of his life. Hawkins'' father was a tailor in the Fell''s Point section of Baltimore who died when John was 13. Hawkins had already d.