"Slave
to the Bottle"
By Elaine Frantz Parsons
Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
In Iowa, a person injured by a drunken driver can sue the bar that sold the
driver alcohol. Did you know that this law was passed during the Civil War and
was partly a reaction against slavery?
In the Fall, 2000 issue
of the Annals of Iowa, Elaine Frantz Parsons, a history professor at UW-Oshkosh,
explains how the language of slavery in Iowa at the time of the Civil War gave
rise to this law.
Before this law, saloonkeepers
were not held responsible for damages caused by drunken customers, because people
believed that the drinker's decision to drink, not the saloonkeeper's decision
to sell, most directly caused their intoxication.
But a large anti-alcohol
movement emerged in Iowa in the years before the war. These reformers argued
that alcohol took over the drinker's will, robbing him of the ability to stop
drinking. They believed that saloonkeepers often tricked or enticed men into
drinking. Once the "fatal first drink" had entered a man's system,
he was at the saloonkeeper's mercy.
Reformers called these
helpless drinkers "slaves to the bottle" and argued that saloonkeepers
were like slave masters. Just as a slave worked for the profit of his master,
so a "slave to the bottle" handed his earnings over to his saloonkeeper.
Like a real slave, the "slave to the bottle" cursed his shackles,
but found himself unable to escape them.
The slavery metaphor was powerful in 1862, when Iowans were fighting the war that would end the institution. In that year, Iowa became one of the first states to pass a law allowing injured parties to sue saloonkeepers for damages caused by their drunken customers. For many years after the war ended, lawyers in these suits continued to refer to drinkers as "slaves" "shackled" by drink and the saloonkeeper.