temperance

Early one morning, as I pulled myself up from the bathroom floor with a most terrible headache, I swore an oath to never drink again. I vowed to empty the rest of that demon vodka down the sink, thwarted only by the fact that I had drunk all of it the night before and there was none left to dispose of. I made a promise to myself to remain sober and self-possessed throughout the remainder of my days, and while I have thus far failed miserably in this endeavor, I nonetheless continue to derive strength and inspiration from the many images of drunken folly archived in The Picture Collection. Created during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when that most beloved of crusades, the temperance movement, gained particular momentum in the United States and Europe (capped off by that very successful and victorious era in U.S. history known as Prohibition), these images very acutely document the destructive and evil forces of alcohol. When I am overcome with temptation, which is always (I am swigging from a bottle of absinthe right now), I look at these images in order to be reminded of the foolishness of my ways, and now I am posting them online so that you, dear readers, will benefit as well. As these pictures make perfectly clear, without immediate intervention we will all soon be terrible mothers, fathers, wives and husbands, make spectacles of ourselves at fashionable parties, fall into debt and poverty, dress in rags, be mocked and jeered at by children, wind up arrested, in court, in prison and insane, commit murder and/or suicide, and be visited by devils while sleeping in our beds at night. Shall I go on? Of course not – you can see the end results for yourself.

Related: The Picture Collection's images of New York City Saloons

A few weeks back I presented a program with Michael Lerner, the author of Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. I like to read the books of the authors I present, and so far I have managed to do this (though I don’t always finish in time for the program). In the case of Dry Manhattan, when I made my presentation I had only one chapter left.

If you have not seen the cover of this book, well let me say it the sharpest jacket cover I have ever seen. And even though they always tell you in library school that you’re not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover, Dry Manhattan’s wonderful jacket cover is indicative of the pages therein.
New York City history is always fun and when it is well written, interesting and important, to me that spells “winner!” And that’s what this book is. I can say this with confidence because not only have I read the book, but I noticed another co-worker reading it as well. He and I discussed what we liked about it and not surprisingly they were the same things. More recently, I noticed another co-worker getting ready to read the book. She’d gotten a glowing recommendation from the co-worker with whom I had discussed the book. Like I said, it’s a winner.
Lerner brings together many parts of history that before, for me, had been separate and independent of each other. History for which I had sensed there were connections but never could see how or why they fit together. Dry Manhattan is a wonderful road map to a place I did not understand before.