Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [85]
There was more than a little trace of elitism in the war against gambling. At the New York constitutional convention of 1821, a constitutional ban on lotteries was proposed. One speaker, hotly in favor, cursed lotteries for their “tendency to promote and encourage a spirit of rash and wild speculation amongst the poor and labouring classes—to fill their minds with absurd and extravagant hopes”; these hopes “diverted” them “from the regular pursuits of industry.” The lottery, in other words, like dirty books and pictures, had the effect of “debauching” the morals of the population.32
What was voiced here, too, was a classic American (and British) insecurity: a fear of work disincentives. This was a country that cultivated, encouraged, demanded, even thrived on “extravagant hopes”; but people were supposed to realize these hopes only in socially acceptable ways. Gambling was odious, then, because it was the wrong way to make money: it mocked the ideal of slow, steady progress through hard work. But the actual anti-gambling movement of the nineteenth century (or most of the century) was basically a form of the Victorian compromise.
Demon Rum
The liquor question deserves a special place in any discussion of the law of vice. Drunkenness had, of course, always been condemned; but there was, for the first time in the republic, a genuine temperance movement. How could a democracy govern itself, how could the people rule, unless the population was earnest, sober, disciplined? Hence drunkenness, like vice, threatened the very basis of a democratic order. As Lyman Beecher put it, in 1843, “When the laboring classes are contaminated, the right of suffrage becomes the engine of destruction.”33 As the country industrialized, liquor became an even more sinister enemy of order. A drunken farmer was one thing, a drunken factory hand another. Industrial discipline demanded punctual, orderly work habits. A man sloshed in liquor could hardly meet the test.
In the nineteenth century, drinking was blamed for almost every social evil: crime, pauperism, general decay. Intoxication destroyed religion, property rights, family life. When Irish and German immigrants poured into the country, strong drink also became associated with the foreign underclass. The temperance movement, which began as a movement of “moral suasion,” moved into politics, and a drive began to pass restrictive laws.34
The most famous of these was the so-called Maine Law. That good Yankee state, in 1851, adopted a statute prohibiting the manufacture or sale of “any spirituous or intoxicating liquors, or any mixed liquors a part of which is spirituous or intoxicating.”35 Other states soon enacted their own versions of the “Maine Law.” Most of New England was firmly in the temperance camp by 1856, when this particular spasm of temperance peaked. At that point a reaction set in; some laws were repealed, while others were weakened. The campaign heated up again, as we shall see, later in the century.
The Revolution of the Righteous
The Victorian compromise held firm, more or less, for most of the nineteenth century; or so it seemed. But in the years after 1870, it began to crumble. There was an outburst of new, more stringent legislation; there were (apparently) stronger attempts at enforcement. The issue of victimless crime, of vice, of sexual propriety, ratcheted a bit higher on the national agenda. And it was the righteous, the respectable, the religious, who broke the (implicit) truce. Many moral leaders of society, in 1870 and afterward, were simply no longer satisfied with damning and damning; they smelled victory, and they wanted it. They demanded the elimination and prohibition of vice.
In the 1870s, societies for