"Drunk and Disorderly": Alcoholism and the Search for "Morality" in Jamaica, 1865-1920

IntroductionBoth Britain and its colonies overseas, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed concerted campaign by moral reformers curb the vice of alcoholic consumption and the drunkenness that often resulted from excess drinking.1 These reformers, mainly from the middle class, subscribed temperance movement whose ideology equated sobriety with decency and social respectability. Although the temperance movement may have originated the United States early the nineteenth century, its spread and embrace by Britain's burgeoning bourgeoisie fitted well with their Victorian concepts of morality which they intended proselytise throughout the empire. This new morality emphasised notions of self-constraint, individual responsibility, and sober reflection that were essentially parts of body of social virtues that would promote self-improvement. According Craig Heron:Temperance had become cornerstone of emerging middle-class identities through which . . . growing numbers of professionals, businessmen, whitecollar workers, master artisans, and their families differentiated themselves various ways from the rougher elements of the manual workers below them and the decadent aristocracy above. ... Its members were not simply creating narrow class culture, as the older aristocracy had done. The middling classes' promotion of and support for this ideology of self-improvement became part of hegemonic way of viewing the world, an approach intended suffuse the whole social and economic structure and influence its development.2In Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean, that campaign was part of broader mission civilize the people and tended focus largely, though not exclusively, on the poorer non- White classes, and was therefore some degree racialized. This campaign reached crescendo at the turn of the twentieth century. This article will examine the methods by which this antidrinking campaign was conducted, the major players, and its consequences. It will argue that despite growing recognition of the harmfulness of excessive alcoholic consumption, Jamaicans of all classes were not prepared be dictated by cultural minority whose agenda seemed be aimed at depriving them of every avenue of pleasure that did not conform their superior imported moral code. In the end, the campaign curb would fail.Growing Problem of IntemperanceSome contemporary commentators believed that before the 1870s, the Jamaican people displayed great sobriety and that intemperance was not a prevalent vice.3 Indeed, 1873 Methodist missionary Samuel Smyth commented that One might live whole year some localities and never see drunken man. But even then he observed that drinking habits are being formed and rum intoxication is on the increase.4 That Jamaicans, who had been engaged for more than two centuries the manufacture of rum, should have been characterized almost as teetotallers would mark them as unique the post-emancipation Caribbean. To large degree, this perception of sobriety was chimerical, and was due mainly dearth of public bars and rum shops where ordinary Jamaicans could go drink.Most drinking, therefore, was done in one's own house or at friends. According the Jamaica Post, this home-drinking was carried on to an extent little known, and the curse accompanying it is beyond description. Because it occurred out of the public view, it was difficult discern or gauge its extent.5 However, already by the 1870s the problem of excessive was sufficiently noticeable lead some concerned individuals begin forming temperance societies combat it (see below). When rum shops, taverns and other establishments started proliferate the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the issue of alcoholism and drunkenness became matter of serious public concern. …