Search for Higher Power
THE ENEMIES OF THE Water Street Mission attacked on July 4. Jerry McAuley, a reformed drunk, had been under no illusions when he opened the mission in a New York City slum in 1872. Water Street was one of the most notorious streets in the city. Located just a block from the crowded East River docks, it was known for its many seedy bars and the prostitutes who made themselves available to sailors and other passersby at all hours. He knew he had enemies. The saloon keepers hated him because he welcomed drunks, and many of them were getting sober. The police hated him because they took bribes from the saloon keepers, so they joined in the harassment directed at McAuley and his mission. But he never expected the mission to be attacked with fireworks.
On Independence Day, a barrel appeared in the street in front of the mission before the evening service. A ruffian posted at the mission door signaled to men in the street whenever someone stood to testify to the blessings he had received from God. Fireworks were lit and dropped in the drum, exploding so loudly they drowned the voices inside. But McAuley was resourceful:
I said to the congregation, “Now I want you to watch me: I’ll select a hymn ahead of time, and the moment I say ‘Sing!’ just sing with all your might, and when I say, ‘Testify!’ be ready and spring right up.” A convert arose and opened his mouth, when bang! bang! bang! went the fireworks in the barrel. “Sing!” I shouted, and they fairly roared; my! What lungs they had, and you couldn’t hear the fireworks at all! Just as soon as that pack was out I called “Testify!” and a brother jumped up, and before they could get the next pack ready and rightly on fire he was through, and then we drowned the racket again with a grand old hymn.
When the hooligans ran out of firecrackers, they were reduced to shooting some Roman candles against the back of the house. “[W]e never had a better meeting,” McAuley insisted. “Several were helped spiritually, and among others one soul was gloriously saved!”1
The saloon keeper across the street who had orchestrated the disruption eventually moved elsewhere, and so did many others who tried to do business in the same space. “We carried the matter to God, and prayed him to break up whoever came in there to sell rum; and that prayer was heard, for 15 or 16 failed one after another,” McAuley explained. The Water Street Mission had opened two years after the founding of the AACI. Its success was an early indication that religion would be a powerful force for recovery in the last half of the nineteenth century.
His neighbors in County Kerry, Ireland, would probably have said that McAuley was born bad. He was certainly angry. According to a brief autobiography McAuley wrote in 1875, his father was a counterfeiter who fled home to avoid arrest. He said nothing about his mother. He was raised by a grandmother whose prayers he mocked by throwing things at her head as she kneeled. He did not attend school but spent his time getting into trouble. “I got blows for me meat and drink till I wished myself dead many a time,” he said. At thirteen, he was shipped to a married sister in New York but lived with her only a short time before meeting two boys who became his partners in crime. They made their living as river pirates, launching a boat under the cover of darkness to steal what they could from the many ships moored in one of the world’s busiest ports. At nineteen, he was arrested for a robbery and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in Sing Sing prison.2
As McAuley entered the strong stone walls of Sing Sing, he noted a sign above the door.” The way of the transgressor is hard,” it read. Prisons were intended as reformatory institutions, but they used harsh measures to accomplish their goal. When McAuley arrived, Sing Sing still banned prisoners from all conversation and punished infractions with techniques that are regarded as torture today. The punishment didn’t work on McAuley. “[I]t only made me harder and harder,” he said.3
But prison did change him. One Sunday, about five years into his sentence, he was shocked to hear one of his criminal confederates address the inmates during religious services. Orville Gardner, a former prizefighter and thief, had such a terrible reputation that he was known as “Awful Gardner” in the New York newspapers. He was also an alcoholic, but the death of his young son had forced him to take a hard look at his life, including his drinking. He put a two-quart jug of whiskey in a boat and rowed to a clearing on the Brooklyn shore. “Now it is give you up forever or never leave this place alive,” Gardner said, addressing the jug. He fought temptation for nine hours, praying for help. He rejected the idea of smashing the jug, fearing the smell of whiskey would be irresistible. He dug a hole, buried it, and rowed back to Manhattan.4
McAuley was deeply moved as Gardner told his story. Back in his cell, he picked up a Bible and began searching for a passage that Gardner had recited. He read the whole book twice. “I was resting one night from reading, walking up and down and thinking what a change religion made in Gardner, when I began to have a burning desire to have the same,” McAuley said. He knew that he should pray for forgiveness, but he was convinced he had committed too many sins. McAuley was in agony for weeks until he heard a voice say, “Go to God; He will tell you what is right.” He fell to his knees on the cold stone floor of his cell, determined to stay there until he found forgiveness. “I was desperate,” he said.
All at once it seemed as if something supernatural was in my room. I was afraid to open my eyes. I was in an agony, and the sweat rolled off my face in great drops. Oh, how I longed for God’s mercy! Just then, in the very heart of my distress, it seemed as if a hand was laid upon my head, and these words came to me, “My son, thy sins, which are many, are forgiven.” . . . Oh, the precious Christ! How plainly I saw him, lifted on the cross for my sins!
McAuley jumped to his feet and began to pace his cell. “A heavenly light seemed to fill it; a softness and a perfume like the fragrance of the sweetest flowers,” he said. He was not sure whether he was living or dead. He began to clap his hands and shout, “Praise God!” A passing guard asked what was the matter. “I’ve found Christ,” McAuley said. “My sins are forgiven. Glory to God!” The guard threatened to report him in the morning for making a ruckus. No punishment followed, but the authorities were skeptical about McAuley’s conversion. It was another two years before he was paroled.5
McAuley found the streets of New York very lonely when he returned from prison in 1864. “I could not go back to my old haunts and companions, and I knew no others,” he said. He no longer believed himself to be a Catholic, but he had never been to a Protestant meeting, and he met no one who might have invited him to attend. “If I had found a single Christian friend at that time, it would have saved me years of misery,” he said. He found one friend, but this man introduced him to lager beer, a drink that had recently been imported by German immigrants. McAuley knew he had a problem with alcohol. He had not taken a drink since his release from prison. But he was assured that beer was not like whiskey. “They told me it was a harmless drink, wholesome and good and as simple as root-beer,” McAuley said. “I drank it, and then began my downfall. The old appetite was awakened. From that time I drank it every day, and it was not long before I went from that to stronger liquors.”6
With a ready supply of alcohol to ease a guilty conscience, McAuley returned to the Fourth Ward. The Civil War was in its final bloody year, and the federal government was offering a bounty to volunteers as well as a payment to the men who recruited them. “Rascally business that. I would pick men up wherever I could find them, get them half drunk and coax them to enlist,” McAuley said. “I made a great deal of money in this way, which I spent freely. I became a sporting man, went often to the races, and my downward course was greatly quickened.” When the war ended, McAuley became a river pirate again and was nearly killed on two occasions. He was so drunk one night that he fell out of his boat and almost drowned.7
His conscience finally saved McAuley. It had never stopped bothering him. One day, as he was sitting in his room, he heard a voice in the hallway below ask, “Do you love Jesus?” The voice belonged to a missionary, Henry Little, who had met the landlady on the stairs. “No, indade, do I love Jesus; and who is he?” she asked. McAuley jumped to his feet. “That voice—those words! It seemed like long-forgotten music,” he said. Before he could open the door, the missionary had climbed the stairs in search of a tenant at the top of the building. McAuley waited for him on the landing below. He was broke, dressed in dirty clothes, and his head was closely shaved. “I was a frightful looking object,” he said. When Little finally appeared, he was afraid that McAuley might attack him but agreed to meet in the street. McAuley hoped Little might help him find an honest job. As they talked, Little led McAuley to a mission on the Bowery. There, Little and another missionary tried to persuade him to sign a pledge to quit drinking. “I told them I shouldn’t be likely to keep it, that I had taken it many times before, and broken it,” he said. They told him to try again, that God would help him this time. They also promised to help him find work. “Well, to please you I will,” he said.8
McAuley spent the next two years trying to get sober. In 1870, Julius Chambers, a young reporter for the New York Herald, approached McAuley for a story he was writing about river pirates. McAuley was sober and refused Chambers’s offer to buy him a drink, saying he would never again touch the “damnable stuff.” But he did not look well. “I saw a tall, cadaverous man, with strangely white cheeks,” Chambers wrote. “His fine gray eyes had in them a look of hopelessness and lament I could not resist.” He was also terribly thin. When Chambers bought him dinner, McAuley admitted he had not eaten in twenty-four hours.9
Slowly, McAuley’s life began to improve as he found steady work and a sober girlfriend. But he was seeking more than a paycheck and a happy marriage. At work one day, he had a vision in which he saw himself bringing people to God in his old neighborhood by the docks. He persuaded a wealthy friend to give him the use of a former saloon that he owned at 316 Water Street. With money he solicited at religious camp meetings, he cleaned and repaired the space, hung a sign, “Helping Hand for Men,” and opened for business in October 1872.
Once the door was thrown open, the needy flooded into the mission. “Such a sight I never saw,” McAuley said. “Sinners crying, ‘God have mercy on me!’ ‘Lord help me!’ and while I was on my knees the Lord said, ‘You had better open the door every evening.’ And so I did.” The mission was a sanctuary for the homeless. Fifty to sixty men slept there overnight. McAuley said:
They would be stretched out on the benches and then on the floor until there was not room to put your foot down without stepping on them. They were a terribly degraded set, hungry and alive with vermin, but we looked beyond all that and saw only souls for whom Christ died and whom He desired to save, and every now and then God found a real jewel among them.
The jewels were several dozen men and women who were converted in the mission and joined in helping others. Their goal was to lead them to salvation by accepting Christ as their savior and learning to live a moral life. The example was set by McAuley, who used the details of his life to demonstrate that no sinner was beyond redemption.10
The nightly meetings at the Water Street Mission were unique. There were no fire-and-brimstone sermons urging people to repent or face eternal damnation. The people who came to the mission were already in hell. The service started with hymns and a reading from the Bible. Then McAuley rose from his wooden armchair to make a brief statement:
Why do you come to this prayer meeting? Is it to thank God because you’re happy? No. You come here because you’re wretched and miserable. You know you’re living in the gutter and you know it’s your own fault. God didn’t put you in the gutter. You went there of your own accord.
McAuley did not dwell on the sinfulness of his listeners. He had been a sinner himself. “I’ve been a thief; I’ve been in jail. . . . I’ve been as low as any man or woman in this room,” he said. He focused on the solution:
I crawled up out of the gutter at last, with God’s help, and now I want to get you out. You feel that you’re sinners. You feel, deep down in your hearts that you’re low, miserable and degraded and I tell you that you’ll never feel any better or be any better until you stop sinning and come to Christ.
He would then invite anyone who was ready to stop sinning to stand and speak.11
For the next thirty to forty minutes, men and women spoke from the heart. Some simply testified to the power of their conversion. “God spake peace to my soul one day at four o’clock in the afternoon on board the ship George Peabody at Pier 14,” a sailor said. Others wanted to describe their struggles at length, forcing McAuley to impose a restriction. “SPEAKERS ARE STRICTLY LIMITED TO ONE MINUTE,” said signs posted around the room. One minute was long enough to ask for help. “I am a confirmed drunkard. I have lain out all night in the gutter,” a man said. “Help me. Pray for me. I’m afraid I can’t hold out.” “God will help and we will help,” McAuley responded. “Let us first ask the pity and the help of God.” At the end of the testimonies, McAuley rose again:
We’re going to have prayers now. Don’t you want to be saved tonight? Who’ll stand up for prayers? There’s one, there’s two, three, there’s another. Don’t be afraid to stand up. It don’t make any difference what kind of clothes you have on. . . . You’ve got to cry to God for help if you want to get rid of your bad habits.
McAuley would then walk along the line of people kneeling, placing his hand on the shoulder of each man and woman and helping those who were having trouble forming their words. “I can’t pray,” one man said. “I’m too bad. I’m afraid to.” “You can’t be too bad,” McAuley replied. “Just say, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’”12
McAuley knew that most of those who experienced conversion would not remain saved, especially the drunks. The converts were surrounded by misery, and whiskey was only three cents a drink. “If you lived in this place, you would ask for whiskey instead of milk,” a woman told a missionary as they stood in the rear court of a tenement. McAuley kept his converts busy:
I’d have fallen again if I hadn’t been so busy holding on to others. And that’s the way to keep men. Start them to pull in somebody else. When your soul is on fire, longing to get hold of every poor wretch you see, there’s no time for your old tricks nor any wanting to try them again.
Each convert contributed what he or she could. Some of the women visited the sick and sewed clothing for children.13
The drunks took care of their own. “Happy Charlie” Anderson was in charge of the new men, even before they had finished giving testimony, helping steady them as they spoke. He and the other reformed men made sure that the new recruits were fed and clothed, helped them find jobs, and strengthened their resolve when they were tempted to drink. The sober men were models for the newcomers, living proof that recovery was possible. “I saw men who had come into the mission sodden with drink turn into quiet steady workers,” wrote Helen Stuart Campbell, a writer and social reformer who was introduced to the mission in 1878. “Now and then one fell—in one case permanently—but the prodigals commonly returned confessing their weakness and laboring earnestly to prove their penitence.”14
McAuley died of tuberculosis in September 1884. Not many of New York’s numerous newspapers mentioned his death. The few reporters who covered the funeral were probably surprised to discover a large crowd outside the Broadway Tabernacle, one of the biggest churches in the city. It had been full for hours, and people were packed into every approach, forcing the police to push and shout to get the minister in the door. It was one of the largest funerals for a private person that had ever been held in New York. Eminent businessmen and ministers took turns praising McAuley. There were “many gentlemen and ladies” present, but the reporters were watching everyone else:
“old women, wrinkled and seamed” . . . “here and there sprinkled through the crowd the painted face of the scarlet woman showed itself.” . . . “the straw hats of a few homeless tramps” . . . “a great many Negroes of both sexes” . . . “the young shop girl who has been saved from temptation” . . . “gamblers and confidence men who seemed very ill at ease.”
These were the lost souls who had found relief at one of McAuley’s missions: drunks, prostitutes, former slaves who had fled the South, the homeless, and the working poor. A shabby man asked a reporter to carry a small bunch of flowers inside. “It ain’t any great shakes,” he admitted.15
McAuley was not alone in showing kindness to alcoholics and other outcasts in the postwar era. In 1873, the year after the opening of the Water Street Mission, women around the country took to the streets in an effort to halt the sale of alcohol. In just a few months, they demonstrated in nine hundred small towns in thirty-one states. They entered saloons and drugstores that sold liquor. If their request to banish liquor was refused, they kneeled in prayer or began singing, driving customers out the door. Some owners agreed to close their business. Others responded with curses and threats or went to court for injunctions barring the women from their establishments. What became known as the Woman’s Crusade for Temperance reportedly closed thirty thousand saloons.
The soldiers of the Woman’s Crusade believed that they could accomplish their goal through spiritual renewal. The movement started with prayers to change the hearts of saloon keepers and broadened into a campaign to help drinkers. They accepted the fact that some people were incapable of quitting alcohol. Many of them had husbands or family members who were alcoholics. Whether they were morally weak or suffered from an illness, they believed the help needed could only come from God. This was the philosophy of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which was organized in 1874 to channel the energy unleashed by the Woman’s Crusade.
The WCTU’s attitude toward drunks would change after it became a pillar of the prohibition movement, but in its early years, it launched a “gospel temperance” crusade that carried the promise of sobriety to drinkers wherever they could be found. The chapter in Newark, New Jersey, was particularly active. A member reported:
We might speak of our gospel temperance work in the jail: how the prisoners sought and found the Savior, the Lord giving us a trophy the first meeting; of our bands of hope and young ladies’ league; cottage prayer-meetings, saloon visiting, etc. But time will not permit. . . . A true record of it is kept on high. It is a blessed work. Unto Him be all the praise and glory forever.
WCTU chapters created “reading rooms, coffee houses, and friendly inns” where men could find sober recreation. Members offered help in literature distributed through Sunday school classes. When a potential convert stepped forward, they stayed after him until he saw the light. In Newark, they visited one man for eighteen months. Finally, he was given suitable clothes so that he could go to church. “He was deeply convicted of sin, and sought the Savior, whom he found able to save, even to the uttermost,” the WCTU reported. The convert had been sober for six months when this report was made. He had become the chaplain for a club of reformed men and had spoken of his experience several times in New Jersey and New York.16
Another Newark man, a “Mr. Jones,” was discovered during a visit to his home, which had received several temperance tracts. His wife greeted the crusaders with evident relief and related the story of her husband’s sad decline. His family, including a brother who was a minister, had been praying for him for years, but it hadn’t stopped his drinking. Once the owner of two houses, he was unemployed; the family was living in rented rooms and had almost exhausted their savings. Still Mrs. Jones was hopeful because her husband had been reading the temperance pamphlets and wanted to speak with the visitors. “He listened with joy to the ‘good news’ of redemption through Jesus’ blood. How Jesus came to seek and save the lost,” one of the visitors recalled. “We felt God’s presence there.” Everyone knelt in prayer. When they rose, Jones agreed to accompany his guests to their church, where he took the pledge.17
When the news of Mr. Jones’s conversion got around the neighborhood, a number of women asked the WCTU to visit their homes. Another ten men were converted. Meanwhile, Jones honored his pledge. “Two years have rolled away since that memorable 3rd day of September, and he is one of our most consistent Christian men, a good citizen, and an earnest temperance worker,” the WCTU reported.18
The Woman’s Crusade was at its peak in the winter of 1874 when it discovered one of its most important converts in Bangor, Maine. Dr. Henry A. Reynolds had once been full of promise. He had graduated from Harvard Medical School during the Civil War and spent two years as a surgeon in an artillery unit. On his return, he opened a successful practice and was named the city physician. However, he soon began drinking alcoholically, binging for six weeks at a time. “I have walked my father’s house night after night for seven nights and days, a raving, crazy madman, as the result of intoxicating beverages,” Reynolds said. He even suffered delirium tremens. He tried different ways to stop, but nothing worked. “I had ‘drunk my last drink’; I had broken my bottle; I had sworn off ‘before a justice of the peace’; I had tried to ‘taper off,’” he said. Finally, he tried the only thing he believed he had left:
I threw myself on my knees in my office, and asked of my God to save me, and promised him that if he would save me from such sufferings as I had once been through, with his assistance I would be true to myself and to him, and do what I could for the salvation of others.
Soon after, Reynolds attended a prayer meeting organized by the woman crusaders. Some doubted the sincerity of the town’s notorious doctor, wondering whether his taking the pledge wasn’t a joke. But Reynolds would express his gratitude to the crusaders for the rest of his life.19
Reynolds was determined to keep the promise that he made to God to work for the salvation of other alcoholics. He believed that drunks were misunderstood:
No nobler class of men walk the earth than some who are drinking men. They are naturally generous, whole-souled, genial, jolly; but by intemperance their minds become diseased. They become scorned and degraded outcasts in the ditch, kept there by thoughtless people, less generous and honorable by nature than themselves. But for rum, these might be on the throne instead of in the gutter.
Reynolds was convinced that many could be saved if someone was willing to make an effort to help them. But his own experience convinced him that few were willing. “I am compelled to give the same painful testimony that so many do, that no one asked me to turn over a new leaf, or said an encouraging word to me in the way or urging me to try and live a sober life,” he said. “Had some kind friend shown me the way out of it, and whispered in my ear that I could be a better man, I might have been so.”20
Reynolds decided that he would establish a club for drinkers who wanted to reform. During his first sober months, he had belonged to a Young Men’s Crusade Club, whose members included teetotalers, moderate drinkers, and drunks. “The result was constant quarreling and strife. The organization died,” Reynolds said. He began to think about a new club that would be closed to nondrinkers, “a society composed entirely of reformed men.” “There is a bond of sympathy between reformed men which binds them together,” he said. He paid for an ad in the Bangor newspapers, inviting men who wanted to stop drinking to a meeting on September 10, 1874. The men of Bangor had a reputation as the biggest drinkers in a hard-drinking state. Eleven appeared at the meeting.21
Reynolds was not a powerful speaker. “It takes me about an hour and a quarter to make a 25-minute speech,” he admitted. But what he lacked in eloquence he made up in his commitment to building his organization. His method was to travel to a town and hold meetings that addressed a general audience, collecting pledges from everyone who wanted to sign. But most of the pledge makers were people who did not drink much. It was the drunks he wanted to reach:
[A]t the close of a series of meetings I get together what of the above-named material I can, and organize a club. These men really become self-constituted missionaries and go to work, which helps to save themselves and others.
Although most reformed men eagerly embraced the missionary role, others needed a kick in the pants. Reynolds was not slow in delivering it to the members he thought were underperforming:
You are to blame for not having a larger and more effective club. . . . Out of gratitude to God for your deliverance you ought to be the first to go out into the byways and hedges, and compel others to come in. I know what it is to have a pleasant home and a lucrative practice; but I have abandoned both that I may be the means, under God, of saving others from the depth of sorrow and suffering from which I have been extricated. I could not rest. Don’t leave a stone unturned to reform others.
He expected his supporters to be as deeply committed to rescuing drunks as he was.22
Reynolds’s focus on the needs of alcoholics led him to part company with prohibitionists. This was probably not easy for him. “I attribute my salvation from a drunkard’s grave to the Woman’s Temperance Crusade,” he said. “I consider myself as a brand plucked from the burning through the prayers of the Christian women of America.” But he refused to lead his troops into the battle for legal restrictions on the sale of alcohol. While he may have favored them personally, he believed that involvement in politics of any kind would distract reformed men. “Let everything else alone. You reformed men have enough business on your hands to take care of yourselves, without being made cat’s-paws for politicians to pull their chestnuts out of the fire,” he advised. This single-mindedness meant that all their energy went into recruiting, which enlisted fifty-one thousand men in the first twenty-one months.23
It certainly helped that Reynolds had a knack for publicity. He developed a catchphrase by continually urging drinkers to “dare to do right” by signing the pledge. But he came up with his greatest innovation as he prepared for the first convention of club members in Bangor in the spring of 1875. Thinking it would be useful for the reformed drunks to recognize one another on the street, he sent his office boy to the dry goods store to buy several yards of red ribbon. He cut the ribbon into six-inch pieces and greeted the arriving delegates by tying a ribbon into the buttonhole of their jacket lapels. The ribbon was more than a tool for promoting group solidarity. It showed the world that they were new men. “I was not ashamed to drink,” Reynolds said. “Why should I be ashamed to acknowledge that I don’t drink? . . . I want to be known as a man who dares to do right.” The red ribbon was also a way of encouraging drinkers to quit. “[I]f every man who reforms wears a Red Ribbon, it won’t be long before the absence of the ribbon will be noticeable,” he explained. Wearing the red ribbon might even help a man resist a moment of temptation:
A man with any decency in his makeup would want to take off his ribbon if he was tempted to drink; but while he was taking it off God would be at work at his conscience to save him from falling.
If the man entered the bar still wearing the ribbon, there was always the possibility that the bartender would refuse to serve him. This may have happened occasionally, but there were rumors that some saloon keepers sought to discredit the reform movement by serving liquor to men who had never reformed, tying ribbons on them, and sending them reeling into the street.24
Reynolds began to establish clubs at the invitation of a WCTU chapter in Gloucester, Massachusetts. A year later, there were fifty Red Ribbon Clubs with twenty thousand members. Next he traveled to Michigan, where he had even greater success. Seven months later, the Red Ribbon Clubs had enrolled eighty thousand; the Detroit chapter alone had thirty-seven hundred members. The Michigan legislature approved a resolution praising the Red Ribbon Clubs for creating a significant decline in crime, although there are no available statistics to prove this. Some of the enthusiasm for the reform clubs spread into Indiana as well. It was reported that every third man walking the streets of Indianapolis was wearing a red ribbon.
At the same time that Reynolds was launching his movement in Michigan, another reformed drunk, Francis Murphy, was taking Pennsylvania by storm. Murphy was a forty-year-old Irish immigrant who had been a saloon keeper in Portland, Maine, before drink got the better of him. He got sober following a religious conversion in jail and organized a club of reformed men there several years before Reynolds got started. Like Reynolds, Murphy got a boost from the WCTU after his speaking gifts were discovered at a temperance convention. Frances Willard, the WCTU corresponding secretary, invited him to Chicago, where he quickly organized eleven clubs. Also like Reynolds, he differed with the WCTU. He refused to support prohibition or to condemn men who were engaged in the liquor business. He also expressed annoyance at nondrinkers who attended his meetings only to be entertained by hearing drunks tell their stories. His meetings were for “the reclamation of men addicted to drink, and not for the amusement of sober people,” he said.25
In 1876, Murphy formed a club in the First Methodist Church in Pittsburgh. Some of the church trustees wanted to throw him out when they discovered that he was drawing a rough crowd. “The reform crowd broke windows, spit tobacco juice on the floor, disordered the pews, and did various other obnoxious things,” they complained. However, there was no argument over Murphy’s success. In the first month, five thousand people signed the abstinence pledge. Churches began to open their doors to new meetings, and Murphy found himself dashing from one meeting to another to address the swelling ranks of reformed men. By the time his campaign was ten weeks old, thirty churches were hosting temperance meetings, and a newly sober man could attend a different one every night of the week. An estimated forty thousand had signed the pledge. Clearly, most of these people were not alcoholics. The enthusiasm generated by Murphy’s campaign was sweeping the city.26
Some of the meetings drew up to two thousand people. Like Jerry McAuley, Murphy asked them to testify to the blessings of sobriety. “Brother George Magoffin will now tell us how good he feels,” Murphy said. “Brother George, tell the people how happy your wife and little ones are since you signed the pledge.” Each of the men told his story in his own way:
The speeches are of every kind, from grave to humorous. Some touching, pathetic recital of past struggles and sorrows, with the names of loved ones, of wife, mother or children, connected with it, elicits tears; while following this may come some quaint reminiscences of services in the tanglefoot battalion, which causes a broad smile, which frequently deepens into a ripple of laughter, among the audience.
Once the new men had gotten used to telling their stories, they were sent to speak at other meetings. They also helped minister to the drunks who were walking through the door for the first time. On Christmas Day, Murphy hosted a dinner for twelve hundred of Pittsburgh’s poor. Drunks were helped to find clothing, temporary housing, and jobs.27
News of Murphy’s success in Pittsburgh soon spread, and he began to receive requests to speak from communities throughout western Pennsylvania. Emulating the success of the Red Ribbon Clubs, Murphy adopted blue ribbons and sent his converts north along the Allegheny Valley to Erie, where one reformed man was said to have obtained pledges from nearly a third of the population. Others worked their way east through southern New York. By early 1877, the blue ribbon movement was becoming a national phenomenon. Murphy became the president of a new organization, the National Christian Temperance Union, which was organized in Pittsburgh in February. At a convention in October, it was reported that members were active in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Kansas, and Nebraska. They claimed to have taken twenty thousand pledges in Missouri, thirty thousand in Colorado, and as many as three million nationwide. Murphy’s followers were particularly strong in Ohio, where the state corresponding secretary reported in late 1877 that one hundred forty thousand men had stopped drinking in the Columbus area alone.
God was not the only higher power in the late nineteenth century. A rival, science, was on the rise, as new discoveries began to change daily life, bringing electric light to dark city streets and making possible the rise of buildings to seemingly impossible heights. Frederick B. Hargreaves celebrated science in 1880 in language that was common to the age:
The march of progress has been . . . onward; intellect has been making rapid strides. . . . Invention has succeeded invention, discovery followed discovery, till the miracle has ceased to be a marvel, and the elements nature and science, have become tributary to the masterly powers of man.
In such an age, it was easy to believe that science would one day cure alcoholism. The men who belonged to the AACI were skeptical, but miracle drugs were being discovered all the time. The public craved new cures, and the purpose of Hargreaves’s pamphlet was to deliver the good news to alcoholics. Its title was Gold as a Cure for Drunkenness, Being an Account of the Double Chloride of Gold Discovery Recently Made by L.E. Keeley of Dwight, Illinois.28
Hargreaves was a twenty-five-year-old English minister who emigrated in 1872 to assume a post at a Presbyterian church in a small rural community south of Chicago. He led his new congregation for only fifteen months before moving on. He secured a job in another church but left after three months. He found one more pastoral position but was fired because of his drinking. He scraped by doing legal work for several years until the rise of the gospel temperance movement gave him a new lease on life. He became a lecturer for the Illinois State Temperance League and traveled around the state addressing members of the ribbon clubs.
During these years, Hargreaves lived in Dwight, a town of eighteen hundred that lay along the line of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, seventy miles south of Chicago. There he became friends with the town’s physician, Dr. Leslie E. Keeley, a veteran of the Civil War who had moved to Dwight after graduating from Rush Medical College in Chicago. According to Hargreaves, one day, after returning from a lecture tour, he and Keeley discussed the plight of a mutual friend with alcoholism. They had both heard of a drug that was supposed to help a person stop drinking. It was probably a nauseant like ipecac that could be added to whiskey as Albert Day had done, causing a drinker to vomit so violently that he would become nauseated if he even smelled alcohol again. They decided to experiment with it, using a local saloon keeper, Pat Conafry, as the test subject:
[Keeley] said Pat would take anything he asked him to take, so he fixed up a bottle and gave it to Conafry; and in a few days he lost his desire for liquor, and could not drink any at the end of about a week. He, however, made strong efforts, and one Sunday got a drink to stick and got gloriously drunk and would not take any more medicine.
Hargreaves and Keeley were delighted with the result of their experiment and believed that they had made an important discovery. They used the medicine to help a second man, John P. Campbell, and began to discuss how to market the product as their own. Campbell joined the venture as a partner.29
The only detailed account of the origin of the “Keeley Cure” comes from a deposition given by Hargreaves in a lawsuit that was filed against him by the Keeley Institute in 1902, two years after Keeley’s death. Keeley forced out Hargreaves as a partner in 1886, depriving him of a share of the enormous profits generated by the cure a few years later. Hargreaves started marketing his own cure and, after Keeley’s death, was sued by his heirs who feared Hargreaves was about to reveal the Keeley formula to help create a new business that would undercut the Keeley Institute. Much of what Hargreaves said about Keeley during his deposition was extremely unflattering, perhaps even defamatory. But there is no question that he worked closely with Keeley in launching his business. His account, which was given under oath, provides details about the discovery of the Keeley Cure that are unavailable elsewhere.
According to Hargreaves, Keeley was initially reluctant to become publicly identified with the sale of a cure for alcoholism. Doctors were seeking to establish their expertise as healers at the time, and one of the ways they emphasized their superiority was by condemning the patent medicines that promised to cure virtually every illness. Keeley feared that being associated with the cure might damage his reputation. He was supplementing his income by serving as a doctor for the railroad and thought he might lose his job. As a first step, they agreed that Hargreaves and Campbell would rent a hotel room in Bloomington, Illinois, and begin advertising for patients. They spent a month in Bloomington, but it was hard going. “It was a new thing, you understand, and people were skeptical,” Hargreaves explained. The failure in Bloomington convinced Keeley that he had to vouch for his product publicly. “He took the position that . . . it would give more tone and prestige to the business if his name was used . . . and so we decided to call the firm name ‘Leslie E. Keeley, M.D.’”30
Meanwhile, Hargreaves and Keeley had decided that they needed to make changes in their medicine. They called it a “tonic” that could help a man stop drinking, but it was effective only in the early days of the sobering-up process. They continued to experiment in the hope that they would find a drug that would permanently eliminate the desire for alcohol. One possibility was gold. Gold salts had been used for medicinal purposes since ancient times. In Keeley’s day, the use of gold chloride was declining because of the danger of kidney damage and poisoning by the mercury used in gold extraction. However, some doctors still prescribed it for skin and venereal diseases. It was also thought to stimulate the brain and nervous system. Keeley was not the first doctor to suggest that it might be useful in fighting addiction.
According to Hargreaves, Keeley almost killed the first drunk he treated with gold chloride. A sewing machine salesman named Dalliba, the only patient that they had been able to recruit in Bloomington, had a bad reaction to the gold pills that Keeley had given him. “We had a bad time with him. Keeley had to come down two or three times, and we finally had to stop it,” Hargreaves said. But it was only a brief setback, Hargreaves said.
[W]e hit on another remedy that did all we ever expected the gold to do; and it was a far more valuable specific for drunkenness than gold; and we used that in place of gold. Keeley has often said to me: “What a lucky thing we happened to hit on that drug,” as it saved further experiments and was not dangerous.
Hargreaves asserted that Keeley stopped using gold within months of launching the business. Nevertheless, he insisted on advertising his medicine as the “Double Chloride of Gold Cure.” “It was an awful good name, and Keeley hated to part with the name,” Hargreaves said. He justified it by saying there are particles of gold in everything. “Keeley would often say, ‘There is a trace of gold anyway in it, and that is enough.’”31
Hargreaves said Keeley bent the truth frequently in the early months of his enterprise. The business was started on a shoestring. None of the partners was wealthy, and they sold very little medicine during the first six months of 1880. They found it hard to raise twenty-three dollars to publish Gold as a Cure for Drunkenness. It contained an introductory letter from Hargreaves in his capacity as vice president of the Illinois State Temperance League and several articles purportedly written by Keeley. Hargreaves claimed to have written almost everything published under Keeley’s name. “[N]o one ever accused him of being able to [write],” he said.32
According to Hargreaves, the only pieces that Keeley contributed to the pamphlet were fictionalized testimonials. Although the business was in its infancy, the pamphlet consisted of dozens of statements from doctors, lawyers, employers, and other prominent men. Hargreaves said he wrote most of them, signing the names of Keeley’s friends and associates, even giving one the title of General. Hargreaves said that Keeley wrote the patients’ testimonials himself. A little dishonesty was necessary, Hargreaves explained. Times were hard. “We were not ‘lying on flowery beds of ease,’” he said.33
Slowly, the Keeley Company began to grow. At first, the gold cure was sold by mail. Later, to increase income, patients were encouraged to take their treatment in Dwight under Dr. Keeley’s supervision at a cost of a hundred dollars for four weeks. One of the first patients at the Keeley Institute was a newspaper editor from Missouri Valley, a small town in western Iowa. Robert Harris arrived in Dwight in 1889 after more than a decade of heavy drinking. Harris recalled that he was one of only four patients and that the group followed a strict treatment regimen. They received injections of the newly formulated double chloride of gold at 8 a.m., noon, 5 p.m., and 7:30 p.m., and were required to drink several ounces of tonic every two hours. After three weeks of treatment, Harris left Dwight convinced that he could stay sober. “It was the cure I was after . . . and every day since that time I have thanked God that there was such a man on earth as Dr. Keeley,” Harris said. Back in Missouri Valley, Harris used his newspaper, the Times, to broadcast the news of the liquor cure. He persuaded eight of his friends to depart for Dwight. “[I]n every case, the cure has been as perfect and successful as it was in my case,” he reported in 1891.34
Missouri Valley was only the first Iowa town to embrace the Keeley Cure. A woman in Boone read one of Harris’s articles and showed it to her husband, William Marsh, a prominent businessman who was unable to stop drinking. When Marsh returned from Dwight, he persuaded the son of the town’s wealthiest man to go. Over the next eighteen months, the two newly sober men preached the Keeley Cure to every drunk they knew, and helped pay for those who couldn’t afford the train fare, treatment charges, and room and board. F. M. Havens, a close observer of the Boone experiment, described the outcome in a letter to a friend:
The net results in Boone and immediate vicinity are, that 41 men—good men—who 18 months ago were down—many of them to the very worst condition, physically, to which alcohol can drag a human being, are today bright, fresh-faced men, with nothing in their appearance or actions to indicate that they were ever victims of the alcohol habit.
The effect of forty-one sober men returning to a small community must have been dramatic, particularly when they displayed absolute confidence in their ability to stay sober. “If I had the feeling that I am using the least little bit of will power to refrain from drinking, I would be afraid of myself,” one man told Havens. “[B]ut on the contrary, I never think of it—no more than if I never tasted whiskey.”35
The year 1890 was a turning point for the Keeley Company. Keeley and his partners believed that most of the profit from their business would come from the sale of franchises to men who would open Keeley clinics around the country. The franchisees would make a large initial payment for the right to use the Keeley name and become a steady source for the sale of the cure. The dream began to come true with the opening of a Keeley Institute in Des Moines in early 1890. The number of patients was beginning to grow exponentially as graduates shared the good news. Robert Harris, the Missouri Valley editor, explained:
[I]t is strange what a change comes over the spirit of their dreams within a few days after their arrival at the institute. That fear of the people knowing where they are has gone and they are like a new convert to religion—they have found a good thing and they want the world to know it. That is why every patient cured is a walking advertisement for the cured.
Within a year, more than eighty patients were being treated at Dwight every month, and five more Keeley Institutes had opened around the country.36
Keeley’s big break came in a letter from Joseph Medill, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Medill was an important man: he was a founder of the Republican Party, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, and, briefly, the mayor of Chicago. Medill was also a strong temperance man who butted heads with Chicago’s Germans by enforcing a ban on the sale of liquor on Sundays. He had been hearing rumors about the Keeley Cure for several years before he finally decided to send a medical student who was “slightly addicted” to alcohol to Dwight. When the man returned and claimed he was cured, Medill wrote Keeley to inquire further. Recognizing his chance, Keeley gambled everything, daring the publisher to send him “half a dozen of the most confirmed inebriates and hopeless wrecks of alcoholism in Chicago.” Keeley said that if he failed to cure them, he would publicly confess his failure. Medill was intrigued:
The challenge was so bold and startling that I at once accepted it. . . . The experimental cases were sent down to Dwight one at a time, extending over a period of several weeks. And in due time they were all returned to me, looking as if a veritable miracle had been wrought upon them. They went away sots and returned gentlemen. It was amazing.
Medill was not convinced until he has sent some of his acquaintances to Keeley. When they returned sober, he pledged to do whatever he could to promote the double chloride of gold. “I felt it to be a duty which I owed to humanity,” he said.37
The Chicago Daily Tribune began covering the Keeley Institute like it was the next Great Chicago Fire. The reporters clearly understood the kind of coverage their publisher wanted. Dwight “is an elysium for inebriates,” the first wrote.
Dr. Keeley has reformed more drunkards than all the temperance lecturers now strutting and fretting before the imbibing public. He is a connoisseur on drunks, plain and frapped. He delights in the drink-addicted and ditch drunkards are his especially weakness.
“[H]e has treated over 5,000 individual cases, coming from every State in the Union and from countries abroad,” claimed another Tribune reporter, who accepted this grossly exaggerated statistic. The Tribune followed up with editorial endorsements, proclaiming that Keeley “appears to be doing a great work in curing the victims of the drink and opium habit.” It also featured testimonials from doctors, Keeley graduates, and their grateful families. The Tribune promoted the Keeley Cure almost every day for six months, while publishing only a few articles and letters that raised questions about Keeley and his methods. “The town is filled with all the patients it can hold, and every train is surrounded by patients standing ready to welcome the coming and speed the departing,” the Tribune reported. “Sunshine, quiet, hope, relief—these fill the days at Dwight.” The message to drunks was clear. Tens of thousands responded.38
Many of the drunks arrived with members of their family. C. S. Clark, a writer and a patient, recalled:
From a train steps a venerable father or a widowed mother, assisting a wrecked son to reach the platform. Just behind them is a faithful wife, supporting an unsteady husband. Next is evidently a fine business man in the custody of a friend, then a sister accompanying a brother to this place of reformation.
Some arrived alone, drunk and loquacious. Some were unconscious. One man arrived with a tag tied to the lapel of his “ragged, greasy coat”:
PLEASE PUT THIS MAN OFF
AT DWIGHT, AND
NOTIFY DR. KEELEY OR ASSISTANTS
Most were middle-class men who could afford to pay a hundred dollars for treatment, plus room and board. A majority of those who got sober at Dwight were farmers, but there were also many professional men. (The drunk with a tag was a doctor.) There were also a few women who were treated in separate facilities, mostly for opium addiction.39
The Keeley boom transformed Dwight. Keeley and his partners could now afford to construct a handsome brick building to house their offices and a laboratory. Located just two blocks from the train station, it was impossible to miss, as the steady flow of arriving drunks became a torrent. A year after the publication of the first Tribune story, the Dwight institute was treating as many as seven hundred patients per month. Keeley did not provide housing, so the drunks either stayed at the Livingston Hotel next door or boarded with residents. During the day, they strolled along the streets, lounged on the hotel’s front porch, and checked their mail at the post office.
But wherever they were, they stopped what they were doing when it was time to take their medicine. Four times a day, they formed lines in the treatment hall to take injections of double chloride of gold. Some rolled up their sleeves; others wore shirts that had been slit to provide easy access. Everyone waited. When Joseph Medill visited Dwight in 1892, he reported that it took six lines to accommodate everyone. The drinking of the tonic, too, was a collective experience. Clark recalled how strangely it struck a newcomer:
[T]he hour to take it arrives . . . he hesitates and looks around among the hundreds of fellow patients. . . . He notes a sudden graceful, uniform and systematic movement toward perhaps 500 inside pockets; an equal uniform withdrawing of 500 small vials; a grand raising of those bottles toward heaven and then a magnificent lowering to 500 throats! The newcomer looks in profound amazement. Not a smile—not a ripple at this seemingly ludicrous public performance by 500 well-dressed, manly, sensitive men!40
The new men made friends quickly. Treatment at Dwight encouraged a strong camaraderie among the patients that often began within minutes of their arrival. When the train pulled in, there was always a large crowd of men at the station that included patients who had completed their treatment and the friends who had come to wish them well. The remaining patients were quick to approach the newcomers with offers of advice. Clark was one of two hundred patients at the station one day when a well-known politician arrived. The man appeared stunned as he surveyed the crowd. “Gentlemen of the convention,” he said at last. “Is it possible—can such a thing be—that you are all sober?” Amid great laughter, the politician was taken in charge by his fellow drunks.41
Many distinguished men went to Dwight for treatment. Clark was in line waiting for an injection one morning when he tried to engage a new man in conversation by asking him something simple. “Damned if I know, sir,” the man replied. “I don’t know anything; I am simply a fool without sense or reason.” He turned out to be one of the most prominent lawyers in Missouri. Patients at Dwight had a lot of time to kill. They spent much of it in conversation with other drunks, exchanging life stories and strengthening their resolve to be better men. The experience created bonds of deep affection. “I have had an opportunity to sit at the feet of men of learning who are an honor to America—men able to instruct the learned, prepared to widen broad mind, and capable of pointing lessons of love and endurance to those already graceful in these accomplishments,” Clark said.42
What bound the men together even more than their shared history of suffering was the conviction that they were getting better, and not just better—cured. Keeley claimed that 95 percent of his patients got sober and stayed that way. How could the men at Dwight doubt it? They were supplied two-ounce vials of whiskey until they decided that they no longer wanted it. After two or three days, men who had drunk liquor every day for years were revolted by the sight of it.
But this was only a preliminary stage—a reaction to the alcohol antagonist that Keeley and Hargreaves had discovered years before. According to Keeley, the cure—the double chloride of gold—was only beginning to do its work. During his first week at Dwight, John Flavel Mines, a fifty-five-year-old journalist and the author of popular reminiscences of old New York, suffered a kind of depression that normally sent him on a drinking spree. Although Mines had been sober for several months, Keeley prescribed whiskey until the craving passed. When it did, the depression lifted, and Mines experienced a profound sense of release:
When I saw that it had ceased to make me its victim and slave, I could have cried for joy. I knew from that moment that the bichloride of gold had gotten the upper hand, broken the fetters of my disease, and made me whole. . . . [S]uddenly, as if I had stepped out of the blackness of an African jungle into the quiet sunshine of Central Park, I broke out of my living tomb and knew that I was cured.43
In the fall of 1891, the North American Review published articles by several doctors who considered Keeley a fraud. But the criticism hardly made a dent in his popularity, even after Mines got drunk and died in a New York charity hospital. Keeley could count on the loyalty of his patients. Two days after Mines’s well-publicized death, Keeley returned to Dwight from a European trip. Descending from the train, he found seven hundred patients drawn up in double lines along two blocks of the street leading from the station to the institute. As he passed, the men raised their hats in salute.
Keeley had never claimed that he could save every alcoholic. He estimated that 5 percent of drunks were beyond hope. He acknowledged that he could do nothing for the man who wanted to keep drinking. He told a group of departing patients:
You must remember that I cannot paralyze the arm that would deliberately raise the fatal glass to the lips. When you all go out into the new life, I will have placed you exactly where you were before taking the first drink. You will look back over the past and then contemplate the future, and you will then choose which path you will follow the balance of your days.
While it was appropriate to warn the drunks that they would face temptation, the warning was undercut by the assertion that they had been fully restored. The promise of the Keeley Cure was that double chloride of gold healed cells that had been poisoned by alcohol, eliminating the craving for drink. The cured drunks were once again like other men.44
Not every Keeley graduate felt confidence in the future. Some admitted to nervousness as the train carried them ever closer to home and its temptations. But most expressed confidence in their ability to stay sober. “Yes sir, it is his own fault if he don’t [stay cured], and it is not the fault of the treatment,” one Keeley graduate said. “If a man wants to behave himself, he can, and he can make a damn fool of himself if he wants to.” The feelings of the departing Keeley men were well expressed by Eugene V. Debs in the spring of 1893. In a few years, Debs would help found the Socialist Party and later run for president four times as its candidate, but at the time, he was a thirty-seven-year-old official of a union of locomotive firemen. The remarks he delivered on leaving the Keeley Institute suggest that he had followed the same road as the other drunks:
I feel this morning as I never felt before, the utter meaningless-[ness] of words to express my gratitude for my deliverance from the fetters that have heretofore bound me, and the privileges I have enjoyed while here, of knowing so many manly men and splendid women. . . . For 20 years I continually indulged in the use of alcoholic stimulants, and I can see myself this morning, after passing through this magical treatment, as I was, and I feel very grateful for the great change that has taken place in me.
To the other graduates, too, their sudden deliverance from alcoholism seemed miraculous.45
The growth of the Keeley Institute was breathtaking. Beginning with one patient in 1889, the Keeley Company reported over $170,000 in profits just two years later. Men who wanted to open franchises were throwing money at Keeley in 1891. Twenty-five branch institutes opened in that year, and Keeley began to think about expanding abroad. He dreamed of building a world headquarters in Chicago and angered the directors of the city’s Washingtonian Home by offering to buy their institution and run it properly. The Keeley juggernaut continued to roll in 1892. It seemed that every city wanted to brag about their Keeley Institute, and seventy-five new facilities opened. Profits hit $508,966. In early 1893, Keeley seriously considered selling his company to a New York syndicate for $2.5 million but was unable to agree on all the terms of the sale.
As the Keeley Institute spread across the country, its graduates also established a national presence. In April 1891, when there were still relatively few patients at Dwight, three of them formed a Bi-Chloride of Gold Club and began meeting in a blacksmith’s shop every morning after the first shot of the day. New patients were invited to speak, and men who were departing made farewell remarks. Soon, graduates were writing to the club about the experience of returning home. “These letters were always encouraging. Their moral effect on the patients, still anxious about themselves, is invaluable,” a club member recalled. The men who were writing the letters began to form their own clubs in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Lafayette, Indiana, and Farmington, Maine. There were soon fifty clubs in twenty states. Three hundred members arrived in Dwight in February 1892 to form a national organization. “With as much pride as if it had been a military decoration,” many of the delegates wore a Bi-Chloride of Gold Club pin, which featured an upside-down horseshoe bracketing the initial “K.” The design became the emblem of the new Keeley League.46
The Keeley League had several goals. It wanted to sustain the camaraderie that existed among Keeley patients as a way of helping them adjust to the difficulties of a sober life. For that reason, membership was limited to drunks who had taken the Keeley Cure. The Keeley League also wanted “to further the cause of temperance among all people by curing the drunkard of the disease of intemperance” and to “extend the knowledge of the Keeley remedies.” Its mission was “to bring about a reformation in public sentiment which will close the gates of the prison against the drunkard and open to him the doors of the hospital,” a league official said. A weekly newspaper, the Banner of Gold, became the voice of the Keeley movement. The most important work of league members was to encourage other drunks to get sober and help pay for men who could not afford treatment. In 1893, it reported that they had referred 2,700 patients and covered the expenses of 574. These numbers would grow as new leagues were established. Two years later, there were more than three hundred branches of the league in forty-two states.47
Federal and state governments also supported the Keeley movement. Officials had created veterans’ homes to assist men who had been wounded during the Civil War. But boredom was a big problem, and many of the men used their pension checks to buy liquor. The old soldiers’ homes were declared to be “in a frightful state of inebricy [sic].” Seizing the opportunity to win a federal endorsement, Keeley offered to provide the gold cure at a discount and free training in how to administer it. He won a contract to provide services to the facilities at Forts Leavenworth and Riley. More than a thousand veterans were treated at Leavenworth over the next two years.
State and local governments also promoted Keeleyism. Prodded by constituents who were members of the Keeley League, the legislatures in Minnesota, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Colorado appropriated money to send drunks to local Keeley Institutes. Minneapolis mayor William H. Eustis asked Keeley for advice on dealing with inmates of the city jail who had been repeatedly arrested for drunkenness. Sixty-one men were sent for treatment, including nine who had been arrested more than ten times. Eustis also provided housing for the men until they could find jobs. Fifty-three were still sober five years later.48
By 1893, Keeleyism had become a national institution. In July, there were 118 Keeley Institutes in operation across the country. In its annual report, the executive committee of the Keeley League claimed that a hundred forty thousand patients had taken the double chloride of gold cure. Later, Keeley would claim he had treated nearly three hundred thousand, although this figure appears to include mail-order customers. The success of the Keeley Institutes could also be measured in the rapid growth of competing franchises, including the Empire Institutes, the Oppenheimer Institutes, the Gatlin Institutes, and the Neal Institutes. All made the same sweeping claim to be able to cure addiction to alcohol, drugs, and tobacco using products like Dr. Haines Golden Remedy, the Geneva Gold Cure, and the Kelly Bi-Chloride of Gold Cure.
The expansion might have gone on for years if the country hadn’t been hit by a deep depression. In 1893, almost five hundred banks and fifteen thousand businesses closed their doors. Unemployment rose to 12 percent in 1894 and remained in double digits for four years. The depression had an immediate impact on the Keeley Institutes. A majority of the drunks who traveled to Dwight were farmers, and farmers were one of the groups hardest hit by the depression. Soon the depression affected almost every American and made it increasingly difficult for men to raise a hundred dollars for treatment. While the Dwight institute was never in danger, five branches closed immediately and twenty-four more by the end of 1894.
Leslie Keeley died at his winter home in Los Angeles on February 21, 1900. The death was widely reported. The Chicago Tribune, which had played such an important role in the growth of the institute, published the longest and most respectful obituary. It said that Keeley had built his “palatial residence” two years earlier in the hope that California’s sunny climate would ease his bronchial trouble. At sixty-eight, he possessed “a world-wide reputation” and a $1 million fortune. What the Tribune didn’t say was that Keeley’s influence had greatly diminished. His reputation as a doctor had been battered by years of criticism leveled by members of the American Medical Association, who considered the gold cure a fraud. The leaders of the AACI, who shared his concern for alcoholics, were among his severest critics. The profitability of the Keeley Institute had also waned. There were only forty-four institutes still in operation. Profits had fallen nearly 80 percent.49
But the Keeley Institute survived. Its fortunes revived when the economy began to grow strongly again in 1897. At that point, the income of the Dwight institute was half of what it had been a few years earlier, but it still treated hundreds of patients every month. The number of branch institutes also stabilized. In January 1900, the Keeley League newspaper, Banner of Gold, reported that new institutes had opened in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Seattle, Washington. H. K. Aiken, the owner of the institute in Waukesha, Wisconsin, told the paper that business was good and growing. A few months later, the Keeley Institute Managers Association held its fourth annual meeting in Dwight. The representatives of twenty-five institutes attended.
The survival of the Keeley Institute owed a great deal to its graduates. According to the Banner of Gold, thirteen of the managers who attended the meeting had gotten sober at Dwight or one of the branches. Many of the medical directors were also former drunks. For many of these men, working at the Keeley Institute was more than a job: it was a way of helping other drunks, as well as insurance against a possible relapse.
The depression did kill the national Keeley League, which held its last national convention in 1897. But at least some of the state and local Keeley Leagues continued to operate. The Keeley League of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, reported in 1900 that it raised enough money to send thirty-five drunks to treatment in the previous year.
By 1900, thousands of Keeley graduates had been sober for many years. Most of the former drunks at the managers’ meeting had quit between five and ten years earlier. Willard Brown, who was treated in 1891, wrote to the Banner of Gold saying that he had recently visited Robert Gibson, class of 1894. Gibson bought and sold livestock, but he had no problem being almost constantly in the company of drinking men as he traveled to Chicago. “[H]e is always thrown among a convivial class of men en route, and when the bottle is passed around the car . . . it is no temptation to him,” Brown said. The Sewickley league held a party in 1900 to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the sobriety of its president, George H. Hegner. John R. Heath was seven years sober when he was elected to city office in Joliet, Illinois, by a record majority. Heath was very public about the fact that he was a former drunk, because he hoped it would help others.50
Keeley graduates continued to recruit drunks and help pay for their treatment. “Good things are very few and far between in this world, therefore a man ought to take care of them,” Heath explained. “I got a good cure at Dwight and why should I not take care of it?” Hegner had a limit on what he was willing to spend to help a man get sober, but it was a generous one. “I have the greatest sympathy for the victim of drunkenness and will do anything possible for him—give him three trials if necessary but not more . . .,” he said. “[I]t is too expensive. Three times is my patience.” So many Keeley graduates arrived with drunks in tow that it became part of the daily life in Dwight. The Banner of Gold reported:
There is probably no work in the world so congenial as for a Keeley graduate to place a friend “in line.” They are always ready to start on the first trains and to drop everything to accomplish this result. It certainly is an inspiration to the patients taking treatment to see them here, as they always seem well, happy and prosperous.51
The Keeley Institute couldn’t deliver the miracle it promised for everyone. Most of its graduates would eventually relapse. But many found sobriety for the first time in their lives, and some stayed sober. Even some of those who relapsed kept searching for a miracle, and some would find it. The future held new sources of power for attaining permanent sobriety. One promised a new age.