"Conflicted" Temperance Man From Bourbon County, KY

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"Conflicted" Temperance Man From Bourbon County, KY

Unread postby gillmang » Wed Apr 03, 2013 7:52 am

In 1886 at a national temperance convention, a George W. Bain made some wry comments - he'd have appreciated the pun - about the eponymous whiskey of his birthplace in Bourbon County, KY, as you read here at pp 35-36:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=DSXiAAA ... ey&f=false

What is interesting is that despite the self-deprecation which would have appealed to his audience, his not unkind, indeed almost fond, recollections of the old-time whiskey bring out the native son. With some reverie he states he is just old enough to remember when whiskey was distilled through a worm-still, i.e., a pot still, was unadulterated and the real thing. He notes that it bit like a "serpent" but implies it had social value as compared to the whisky currently made (1886) which he suggested was chock-full of additives and other bad things because run by the "wreck-ti-fiers". So he perpetuates the meme that rectified and blended distillations ruined whiskey while suggesting romantically that the good men of the old "South-land" would not have sold what passed for whiskey in 1886.

Thus was the Janus-face of the liquor question in the U.S., and perhaps because he was born in the County home of James Spears (one claimant to the invention of bourbon), he felt entitled or even obliged to show some Kentucky pride. That was one face, the other was his committed role as a Temperance campaigner, Bourbon County, KY section. He would have viewed it as a transition from an honest if slightly obfuscated age to one in which the commercial liquor interests sank to ever-lower rapacity and greed but where enlightenment finally prevailed as to the mortal dangers of the drinking culture.

I wonder if of occasion he didn't sample the good true old stuff when he could get it, it is sort of implied in his remarks or perhaps it was in the glint of his eye if you could see him speak.

........

The illogicality of his reasoning is as striking as his whiskey humor and rhetorical skills. If whiskey of the old days was a good honest drink that did no harm, why not campaign for the abolition of false whiskey? Why not toughen-up licensing laws? Yet, he participates here before an assembly whose raison d'etre was banishing all forms of drink from the face of the earth. Note too his comment that "science" and "religion" concurred to condemn drinking to the ash bin of history. How convenient, that two movements often in disaccord as to their fundaments would agree so naturally on this one cause convulsing America in the late 1800's. Finally, he couldn't see or wouldn't acknowledge a plain truth: alcohol is alcohol, at bottom.

Thus, I view his "reasoning" principally from a psychological stance and would argue he really wasn't convinced that total Temperance was a valid project. I think part of the old fondness for a lifestyle in which alcohol played some role obtruded on his consciousness, and it came out in this form that you read here.

Gary
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