Originally posted 16 May 2012

Political cartoonist Thomas Nast was one of the best artists of his generation, so it is unfortunate that his talents were frequently put to supporting bigoted candidates and causes. One of the odder examples combines two of Nast’s obsessions: alcohol and immigration to the United States. Given those two concerns, what could be better than a cartoon about rum-crazed Irishmen?

The cartoon is a savage caricature of a riot in New York that was provoked when police broke up a St. Patrick’s day parade. Rum isn’t the alcohol usually associated with Irishmen, but it was the cheapest liquor available and Nast, like many others of his day, associated it with violence and debauchery. Like many modern media personalities, he wasn’t about to let facts get in the way of a good story. Less confrontational cartoons by Nast have been more enduringly popular – he created the popular images of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, and other American icons, and toward the end of his life drew cartoons that showed sympathy for the plight of immigrants.

Originally posted 15 May 2012

The American Presidential election of 1831 was a flowering of dirty politics, featuring savage satire by both sides. The Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, was branded the “log cabin and hard cider” candidate by his opponents, suggesting that he was an old man who had nothing better to do than sit at home and drink the alcohol most associated with country hicks. The strategy backfired when Harrison embraced the accusation, realizing that it reflected the homespun image he sought to project. Since their first strategy hadn’t worked, supporters of rival Martin Van Buren came up with a surprising strategy, namely to claim claim that Harrison actually preferred rum. Harrison, whose other nickname was Tippecanoe, was on the ballot with James Tyler, and both are mentioned in this little ditty:

Rockabye, baby, Daddy’s a Whig
When he comes home, hard cider he’ll swig
When he has swug
He’ll fall in a stu
And down will come Tyler and Tippecanoe.
Rockabye, baby, when you awake
You will discover Tip is a fake.
Far from the battle, war cry and drum
He sits in his cabin a’drinking bad rum.

The new campaign against Harrison was another failure, and Van Buren lost the subsequent election. Harrison did not enjoy his triumph for long, as he died of pneumonia only a month after taking office.

Originally posted 13 May 2012

Just typing the header of this post made me smile; we associate eggnog with Christmas, not flailing fists. The sweet milky beverage is favored by children, and it seems unlikely that it could have once have been at the center of an altercation that imperiled the careers of men who would later become famous. Nevertheless, in 1826 a battle among West Point cadets over an illicit bowl of rum-laced eggnog resulted in the court-martial of twenty candidate officers and one enlisted man. Among the riot participants who was not prosecuted was Jefferson Davis, who later became President of the Confederacy and as such commander of a fellow student who tried to maintain discipline, Robert E. Lee. It all began when the administration of the academy tried to crack down on the drinking of eggnog around Christmas, which had always been against the rules but was unofficially tolerated. In response a group of cadets decided to throw the biggest party West Point had ever seen. This picture shows the cadets enjoying a convivial mug before things got ugly.

Many broken windows and minor injuries later, some cadets had been expelled while others were reduced in rank. Some promising careers had been cut short, and the Academy enforced the rules with renewed vigor. Next time you sip some eggnog as a winter refresher, remember that the seemingly harmless drink was once a focus of contention at America’s elite military school.

Originally posted 11 May 2012

When I was researching the chapter on the rise of the Prohibition movement, I found some fairly odd suggestions on how to reform those who imbibed rum to excess. My favorite so far is this one from the late 1900’s:

I think this might actually work, having once drunk a Korean liquor with a dead pit viper in the bottom of the bottle. Just looking at the scaly creatures pickled in my beverage induced both melancholy and a complete lack of thirst. If you are interested in seeing more of this type of useful information, I recommend you to Questionable Advice, a blog that is filled with wisdom from the pens of advertisers through the ages.

Originally posted 11 May 2012

I was looking up the earliest recipe for a Canadian rum concoction called Moose Milk when I found the following passage about the annual Levees held by governors of Canada. These meetings between the executive and his constituents sound like a jolly time, if you like drinking rum before dawn.

Governor George Simpson’s Athabasca Journal reports that on January 1st, 1821, “the Festivities of the New Year commenced at four o’clock this morning when the people honoured me with a salute of fire arms, and in half an hour afterwards the whole Inmates of our Garrison assembled in the hall dressed out in their best clothes, and were regaled in a suitable manner with a few flaggon’s of Rum and some Cakes. A full allowance of Buffalo meat was served out to them and a pint of spirits for each man.”

It goes to show once again that rum was an integral part of cultures far away from any canefield. As for what it’s like to start your day with a pint of rum and a plate of buffalo meat, that is not recorded. I welcome any chance to find out.

Originally posted 10 May 2012

In the era before television and radio, music was the mass media that reflected the issues of the day. Topical songs were composed to argue points of view, and within days of a news story hitting the headlines, sheet music would appear advocating or satirizing both points of view. The anti-alcohol forces in the USA in the late 1800’s churned out sheet music along with an endless stream of tracts and flyers, most of which depicted alcohol use in apocalyptic terms. A shining example is “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead,” which marries a catchy tune to some very bad rhymes. Here’s a sample couplet:

“We were all fine before daddy drank rum, then all our problems and troubles begun.”

There are many words in the English language that rhyme with “rum”, but that doesn’t mean that Stella the Poetess actually knows any of them…

This piece has a personal side for me – that picture is of a page in my great-grandmother’s scrapbook from the early 1900’s in which she pasted the lyrics of these and other temperance songs that were printed in the Baltimore Sun. I had been amused by the dreadful poetry for many years before I ever heard the tune. Not all the songs are that bad; another temperance song called “The Rum Seller’s Farewell” has surprisingly good lyrics and an interesting premise. The rum seller in question is boarding up his shop on his last day of business – his custom has dwindled because everyone has embraced the virtues of temperance, and now all his former customers are drinking tea with their families instead of carousing all night. Needless to say, the day those crusaders dreamed of never actually came to pass…

Originally posted 09 May 2012

I was exchanging emails with Captain Jimbo of Captain Jimbo’s Rum Project, and he brought up one of the mysteries of rum – that it was not invented earlier. After remarking that sugar and the use of the alembic still both spread westward across the Mediterranean, he wrote, “To deny that this coexistence did not result in distilled cane spirits much earlier (and not in the Caribbean or Brazil) is not convincing. Anything that could be run through an alembic probably was, not least something as common as sugar cane.”

He is right that sugar was widely available in cultures where distilling was a commonplace task. Unfortunately, in some of the likely places nobody made or kept records of economic activity. Sugar was grown in Sicily as early as the year 1000 – is it credible that for over 500 years nobody thought to run the byproduct of refining through a still? Or in Madeira, where the Portuguese were growing sugar by 1400? Unfortunately, with the exception of monasteries where monks used alembics for medicines, almost everyone who might have been involved in the distilling business was illiterate. What few records survived from that turbulent era were made by the aristocracy and concerned with their affairs, not the commercial dealings and diet of their inferiors. At least that is the case of the documents that have been translated – it may be that someone could delve through monastic records or the private letters of merchants and find some casual mention of a new distilled drink. The evidence may languish in some archive, waiting to be found and to extend the history of rum back by hundreds of years. We can only wait and hope.

Originally posted 08 May 2012

If you were a general in the midst of a war, wouldn’t you want your opponents to be drunk? This is a question that might occur to a modern general, but not to an eighteenth-century commander. The proof is in this regulation issued by Sir William Howe to the citizens of occupied Philadelphia:

Rum rations were important to the morale of both sides, and Howe tried to prohibit rum trade as vigorously as he did salt and medicines. Why salt? It was used in pickling, and armies depended on pickled and preserved rations. Howe’s regulation was ineffective and counterproductive – since rum and salt were both used as currency in the coinage-poor colonies, this amounted to a shutdown of economic activity. The trade continued regardless, and the regulation was widely ignored.

Originally posted 07 May 2012

Poets have celebrated rum, lyricists have sung its praises, and artists… well, with the exception of pictures of canefield workers and revelers roistering in taverns, they have mostly left it alone. An exception, perhaps, was Picasso, who painted a picture called “Still Life With a Bottle of Rum” in 1911.

Some people claim to see a rum bottle in this picture. I don’t, so will have to take their word for it.

Originally posted 05 May 2012
In a recent post I asked readers to help identify the approximate date of a picture showing Russian sailors standing around a rum pot on the deck of a warship. The fellow who owns the photo, Mike at The Pirate’s Lair, sent me another shot which is slightly clearer:

I contacted my friendly local Russian Orthodox liturgical music expert, a gentleman named Bernard Brandt, who was able to make out the name embroidered on the sailors’ hats. This reveals that the shot was taken aboard the Dmitri Donskoya between 1885, when the ship was commissioned, and 1905, when the vessel was scuttled by its captain to avoid capture by the Japanese after the Battle of Tsushima.

The next question is where Russia was getting rum for their navy. I was surprised to find that the first sugar cane processing factory in Russia opened in 1723, with some rum production commencing shortly thereafter. Sugar cane grows well in sourthern Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, and there may have been some importation of molasses from other areas to feed the distilleries. Russians are skilled at extracting alcohol from just about anything, so it is no surprise that a high volume of fairly bad rum was available for their warriors at sea. I have not been able to find any information about whether rum rations continued after the Bolshevik revolution – anybody out there who knows is invited to enlighten me.