American Heritage MagazineJune 1964    Volume 15, Issue 4

TEN NIGHTS IN A BAR ROOM


“Father! Wont’t you come home?” right before your eyes in the temperance speakers slides you saw the grief his refusal caused. The melodrama was broad. but many paused before taking another drink
By WILLIAM M. CLARK


It is in man that the spark of divinity rests. But the beasts of the forest and the cattle of the fields, YES, the dogs in their kennels and the hogs at their troughs, do not destroy the muscles of their bodies and the tissues of their brain with THE BOTTLE.”

From torchlit platforms in countless American towns and villages, the warning was pounded home relentlessly throughout the nineteenth century: “JUST ONE DRINK, ONE SMALL DRINK, is all the devil needs …” In ominous tones and with well-practiced flamboyance, temperance orators promised agonies, afflictions, and a pauper’s grave to those who gave in to the Fatal Thirst; their voices could sway the emotions of their audience from pity to anger and back to tears as they thundered perdition and demanded the breaking of the bottles, the smashing of the kegs, the destruction of the breweries and distilleries, the enforcement of total abstinence on those who were too weak by nature or habit to get past the corner saloon on their way home with the pay envelope.

They rarely lacked listeners. Probably no American crusade of major proportions, not even antislavery, has inspired such widespread and long-enduring fanaticism. In a nation where hard drinking was too often a way of life, who did not know some friend or relation who had succumbed to the vice? Those who fought rum fought not so much for morality or for physical welfare as for the elimination of social and economic ills. Prohibit the sale of alcohol, they maintained, and you choke off poverty and crime at the roots.

It was a persuasive message, and never more so than when the temperance lecturers illustrated their sermons with colored lantern-slides—for seeing, of course, was believing. An artist’s conception of the borers and the crawling things that devoured tissues and left lumps and tumors in a drunkard’s stomach was enough to make any man pause before taking another drink.

But as an object lesson, nothing quite matched the moral havoc portrayed in Ten Nights in a Barroom. In that famous cautionary tale, which Timothy Shay Arthur published in 1854, drink did away with an entire village. Small wonder that the book became a kind of dry bible. Ten Nights made fearsome enough reading, but when its searing scenes were projected upon a screen in the darkness of some crowded meeting hall, the cowed spectators might sign a pledge just to get their temperance tormentors out of town.

Here and on the next two pages, in a series of slides that travelled the rounds of the Chautauqua circuit some eighty years ago, little Mary Morgan once again pleads with her besotted parent (the words, “Father, dear Father, come home with me now,” were not Arthur’s but a later adapter’s). All is in vain, for now we witness the torrent of violence unleashed by the Demon Rum. The glass shatters as it bounces from the child’s head. The knife glitters as it enters the breast of poor Willy Hammond, seduced by drink into gambling with the villainous Harvey Green. And the bottle smashes as young Frank Slade brains his bartender father—who has already had an eye gouged out by the mob that kicked drunken Judge Lyman into a pulp, shot Harvey Green as he was being led to jail, and in an alcoholic frenzy wrecked that source and sewer of iniquity, the Sickle and Sheaf saloon.

Meanwhile mothers die from broken hearts, prominent and wealthy men are hauled away to the poorhouse, and the insane asylum bulges with daily additions. But such events were hardly considered dramatic enough for visual presentation; it was the glory of arrested action that the slides captured so well. Who knows how much the sight of them would influence the children of the eighties to back the “noble experiment” forty years later? As a temperance catechism spelled it out for those who would one clay become the front-line soldiers of a great national cold-water army: A true and no-ble boy-hood/Will make a man-hood fine,/Then shun the wick-ed ci-der,/To-bac-co, ale, and wine.

 
“TEN NIGHTS” IN SLIDES

The scene of T. S. Arthur’s gloomy sermon is the rural hamlet of Cedarville, where, during ten nights scattered over a decade, an anonymous travelling man observes the cancerous ravages of the saloon on an innocent community. Stopping for the First Night at the Sickle and Sheaf tavern, he is impressed by his neat lodgings and his friendly landlord, Simon Slade. But this seeming idyl is marred by the sight of the drunkard, Joe Morgan, and the furtive nips taken in the bar by Slade’s twelve-year-old son, Frank. At this point, the slides take up the story:

  1. 1. A year later, the narrator returns to Cedarvillc. On this Second Night in the barroom, Slade tries to eject Joe AIorgan from his establishment. The tavernkeeper hurls a glass—which strikes the innocent brow of Morgan’s daughter Alary, come to fetch her father.
  2. 2. Feverish from her head wound, little Mary makes her remorse-ridden father promise not to drink again until she recovers. Later, she awakes to find him seized with the “drunkard’s madness.” His teeth rattling, he exclaims. “I thought there was a great toad under the clothes.” Airs. Morgan runs for help.
  3. 3. On the Fourth Night, Mary’s life ebbs away. As she breathes her last, Joe Morgan swears that he will never touch another drop. “Oil, father! dear, dear father!” the child cries out with joy—and expires.
  4. 4. Five years pass before the traveller returns to Ccdarville for the Fifth Night. The town has a seedy look, the tavern is filthy and foul-smelling, and Simon Slade’s features betray a coarse sensuality. In this interlude, his son Frank, by now a drunken wastrel, goes out on a Iwoxy buggy ride with another ne’er-do-well, ruining a prize horse in the process.
  5. 5. Sad is the fate of Willy Hammond, the gifted but too amiable son of the local capitalist, whose gambling debts and debaucheries have bankrupted his father. The Sixth Night finds Willy being fleeced at cards by the sly gamester Harvey Green and Judge Lyman, political stooge of the liquor interests.
  6. 6. The game continues on into the Seventh Night. Green accuses the hapless youth of cheating—and plunges a knife into his breast. The wound is fatal. In a violent aftermath, Willy’s mother dies of heartbreak, Green is murdered by an angry mob, and Simon Slade and Lyman are mauled and savagely mutilated.
  7. 7. Ry the Eighth Night, the whole town seems overcome by the sickness emanating from the Sickle and Sheaf. Rut none are more debased than the tavern’s slatternly proprietors, the Slades. In a quarrel, Simon tries to strike his son, but is restrained.
  8. 8. The next night, the Slades Rght again: Frank assaults and kills his father with a brandy bottle. But lo, Demon Drink has claimed its final victim!
  9. 9. Assembling at the Sickle and Sheaf on the Tenth Night, the town votes to outlaw alcohol. “The accursed traffic must cease among us.” proclaims one temperance advocate. “You must cut off the fountain, if you would dry up the stream.” The narrator recognizes the speaker: he is none other than Joe Morgan.