Americans tend to drink in more dysfunctional ways than people in other societies, only to become judgmental about nearly any drinking at all. What’s distinctly American about this story is not alcohol’s prominent place in our history (that’s true of many societies), but the zeal with which we’ve swung between extremes. An obsession with alcohol’s harms understandably followed, starting the country on the long road to Prohibition. By 1830, the average American adult was consuming about three times the amount we drink today. The new country was on a bender, and its drinking would only increase in the years that followed.

Hypocritical though he was, Washington had a point. But he nonetheless took to moralizing when it came to other people’s drinking, which in 1789 he called “ the ruin of half the workmen in this Country.” (He is said to have given them 144 gallons of alcohol, enough to win him 307 votes and a seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.) During the Revolutionary War, he used the same tactic to keep troops happy, and he later became one of the country’s leading whiskey distillers. George Washington first won elected office, in 1758, by getting voters soused. Still, within a couple of generations, Puritans like Cotton Mather were warning that a “flood of RUM” could “overwhelm all good Order among us.” (Barely half would survive until spring.) Before long, they were not only making their own beer but also importing wine and liquor. William Bradford complained bitterly about the latter in his diary that winter, which is really saying something when you consider what trouble the group was in. And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore, short of their intended destination and beerless. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home, and threatened mutiny. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them. This article was published online on June 1, 2021.į ew things are more American than drinking heavily. Photograph by Chelsea Kyle Prop Stylist: Amy Elise Wilson Food Stylist: Sue Li

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