Maine’s Rumble Over Rum

Generic early 19th Century rioting picture.  Apparently all of the sketch artists were assigned elsewhere that day in Portland, but this is probably as accurate as if one had been there.

A lot of people were surprised when Maine became the first state to enact a prohibition law way back in 1851.  None were more surprised than the inhabitants of Portland, a busy seaport and the home to a large, and somewhat rowdy Irish population plus a good many wine loving French-Canadians.  They were said to consume more alcohol per capita than any other city in America—and that was a lot even by the thirsty standards of the early 19th Century. 

Over 300 establishments served or sold alcohol along a stretch of streets near the wharves, some of it by the dram over the bar, some in jugs and bottles, and some in open tubs to be ladled out to outstretched tin cups.  Previously, by law employers were expected to provide rum breaks to laborers at 11 am and 4 pm.

Although beer, wine, and other distilled liquors were available, the drink of the masses was rum.  And on the rum trade and the distillery business most of the big and fashionable houses of the local merchant elite had been built.  Raw sugar imported from the Caribbean was made into rum for domestic consumption and for export.  The wealth rolled in.

So how could such a state and city become the first to ban the manufacture, sales, and consumption of alcohol?  The credit or blame goes to the tireless efforts of Neal S. Dow, a Quaker and reformer who became known as the Napoleon of Temperance and the Father of Prohibition.  Sailors on the ships calling in Portland and the local Irish rabble called him more colorful names.

Neal Dow, Father of Prohibition and Mayor of Portland was just about as much fun as you would guess from this picture of him swathed in Quaker black.

Born in 1804 he was a life-long teetotaler and an early zealot of the infant anti-alcohol movement.  He had helped found the Maine Temperance Society in 1827.  When that group proved to be less than absolutist—they only wanted to ban the distilled spirits and beer of working people while allowing the sale and consumption of wine, the preferred beverage of the privileged elite—he split off and created the absolutely 100% dry Maine Temperance Union ten years later.

Unlike many reformers, Dow was not above getting his hands dirty in electoral politics.  In fact he turned out to be a gifted politician.  The first efforts to enact state-wide prohibition began in the Legislature in 1837.  It was soundly defeated, but undeterred supporters came back year after year.  

Dow became adept at exploiting the revulsion and fear of white Protestants for the wave of Irish Catholic and other immigrants to promote his prohibitionist policies.  This cartoon from after the riots show the standard pug-nosed caricature of an Irishman as the leader of a mob including other undesirables including a bespectacled beer drinking German revolutionary and a Jew in the lower left and some kind of ape like horror  in the lower right. 

The influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840’s frightened Maine Yankees.  Support for prohibition grew as Dow and other supporters painted lurid pictures of depravity among the unwelcome aliens.  Prohibition quickly became a vengeful arrow point straight at the heart of the immigrant community.  By 1849 supporters got enough support to get a bill through the legislature, but failed to get the Governor’s signature.

In April of 1851 Dow was elected Mayor of Portland.  He put all of his powers of persuasion and political clout to reviving the bill.  Again it passed both Houses—many voted for it fully expecting, and hoping that the new Governor, John Hubbard would veto it.  Dow got Hubbard’s ear and persuaded or pressured him to sign, which he did on June 2 of that year.

The national press dubbed it the Maine Law and Temperance forces around the country began pressuring state legislators to copy it.  Dow was hailed as the hero of the movement and was invited to be the keynote speaker at the convention of the largest national Temperance society.

Portland voters, including not only the scummy Irish, but the small merchants who had operated all of those dram shops, bars, and grocery stores that sold liquor, and plenty of thirsty Protestants as well, had a different view.  They handily threw Dow out of office in the next election.

The legislature was also under pleasure and began to ease both the terms of prohibition and the enforcement of the unpopular measure.  Within a few years the rum trade was almost back to normal with various exemptions and exceptions and “home bars” serving the needs of the thirsty.

Undeterred, Dow ran again—and lost again—on a promise of rigorous enforcement in 1854.  The following year, with the public support of the new Republican Party and the clandestine support of the secret, nativist Know Nothings, Dow got his old job back by a razor thin 47 vote margin.

He acted as if he had been given an overwhelming mandate and began once again clamping down on the liquor trade.  The thirsty native grew restless.

In late May of 1851 rumors began to spread that a large supply of liquor, supposedly belonging to Dow, was being kept in the City Hall basement and would be sold at the Mayor’s private profit.  The rumors were half true.  A large shipment of alcohol did arrive at City Hall, and it was slated for sale.  But the booze was bought by the city for strictly controlled sale for “medical and industrial” uses as outlined in the State law.  It was to be sold by a city owned liquor store on the first floor the building.

The angry Irish, suspecting criminal hypocrisy took advantage of a state law that allowed any three citizens to petition a judge for a search warrant, if they believed a crime had been committed.  Judges were required to grant the warrant.  Which a local judge did.

The old Portland City Hall, shown in a late 19th Century photo,  faced a large open market area.  It was a multipurpose building.  The planned state liquor store for sale of spirits "for medicinal and industrial purposes only" would have occupied part of the first floor and a shipment of alcohol for it was in the basement.  Later the building also doubled as an "Agricultural Warehouse."

A crowd of about 200 men marched from the Court House to City Hall on the afternoon of June 2, coincidently the anniversary date of the adoption of the state prohibition law.  They presented their warrant at the door and demanded to be admitted to carry out a lawful search.   Not only were they not admitted, but local law enforcement authorities made it clear that they would not execute the warrant or conduct a search.

A stand-off of sorts happened.  But the crowd grew as men heard of the affair and got off work.  By early evening many, some say over a thousand, were angrily milling about and making threats to rush the building.  There was pushing and shoving and some rock throwing. 

Dow called out the local Militia.  When they arrived they gave the crowd one order to disperse, probably not even heard by most.  Then, on Dow’s personal and direct order, the Militia opened fire on the crowd.  Twenty-two year old John Robbins, an immigrant and first mate of a costal merchant ship was killed outright.  At least 7 more were injured, including, apparently at least some bystanders. 

Despite heavy public criticism for excessive use of force, Dow expressed no remorse.  On the contrary, he bragged about “doing his duty” in letters to other national Temperance leaders.  He never expressed condolences to the families of the dead and wounded.  He characterized them as members of a savage, uncivilized mob.  A local group of Temperance women presented him with a large silver cup in gratitude and he accepted it with pride.

But he could not get re-elected.  He was ousted by a wide vote and never regained job again.

Over the next few years the legislature alternately loosened and tightened prohibition laws.  But agitation over Abolition—another of Dow’s causes—put prohibition on the back burner.

Even the prestige of being a Civil War Brigadier General and war hero was not enough to resurrect Dow's political career.

When the Civil War broke out, Dow, still a powerful figure in the Republican Party, had no problem being appointed Colonel of the 13th Maine Infantry.  He served under General Benjamin Butler in the capture and occupation of New Orleans and was promoted to Brigadier General. He was eventually placed in command of the District of Florida.  In an assault on Port Hudson in Louisiana he was badly injured and evacuated to a plantation home for care.  He was captured by Confederate forces and served 7 months in a prison camp before he was exchanged for Robert E. Lee’s son General Fitzhugh Lee.  In broken health, he left the Army.

After the war and after recovering from his wounds, Dow threw himself with customary energy back into his two passions—Temperance and politics.  In 1865 he helped found a new organization, the National Temperance Society and Publishing House which became the vigorous propaganda arm of the movement churning out books, pamphlets, and tracts that flooded the nation.  Eventually he saw dozens of states adopt versions of the Maine Law.

Politics was tougher.  Despite the cachet of being a Union General and wounded war hero—credentials enough to launch scores of political careers, and being a powerful figure in the most dominant state Republican Party in the country, he was still so hated by the mass of Portland’s working classes that he could not hope to win any elective office.  Moreover as the years wore on he became disenchanted with what he considered the Republican Party’s tepid support of prohibition policies.

In1880 he abandoned his ties to the Republicans and at the age of 76 accepted the Prohibition Party nomination for President.  He garnered only 10,000 popular votes and placed a distant fourth place to James A. Garfield, Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock, and James Baird Wheeler of the Greenbacks.  He thus departed the national political scene as something of a ridiculous figure.  

The Dow House in Portland became the Headquarters of the Maine WCTU and has been named a National Historic Site.

Dow lived on until October 7, 1897 when he died at the age of 93.  He left his house to the cause to which he dedicated his life.  It is the long time headquarters of Maine’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union and a shrine to his memory.  It was declared a National Historic Site in 1974.

Ironically, after the adoption of national Prohibition in 1919, Portland became a prime center for smuggling whiskey by boat from Canada and Scotland.  

A Canadian boat transfers kegs of whiskey to an American rum runner in international waters during national Prohibition.  Portland was a major smuggler's port.

Maine ratified the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution in December of 1933 only after the required 36 state had acted to end prohibition.  The state law was overturned at the same time, which was upheld in a statewide referendum in 1934.

Today, despite the 20 old ladies of the WCTU who still gather at Dow House, Maine drinks as the nation drinks.

Ten Years Gone—Elegies for My Brother

Tim's Senior high school photo doubled as an 8x10 glossy to promote himself as a teenage party DJ.

I was on Google today (Wednesday as I type) trying to find a citation to a long forgotten article I had had written when it popped up, smacking me right between the eyes:

Timothy Peter Murfin, 54, formerly of Chicago, IL and Portland, OR, died in Cincinnati, OH on Feb. 14. Born in Twin Bridges, MT on March 17, 1949 to Willard M. Murfin and Ruby Irene, nee Mills, Murfin, who have both preceded him in death. Survived by children Ira Samuel Murfin of Chicago and Shani Colleen Menz-Murfin of New York City; brother Patrick Murfin (Kathy) of Crystal Lake, IL; stepmother Rae Murfin of Alberton, MT; former spouse Arlene (Packer) Brennan (Michael) of Chicago; former longtime companions Luanne Menz of Georgia and Normandie Nunez of Portland, OR; and three nieces. Memorial service is pending in Chicago.

—Chicago Tribune

February 19, 2004

The gods of serendipity strike again.  I had not quite forgotten.  I brought it up a couple of weeks when someone at church asked about my upcoming birthday and about the twin brother she vaguely remembered hearing I had.  Then I let it slip below my active consciousness again.  Valentine’s Day came and went with other things on my mind—certainly not the first anniversary with a big fat zero in it.

I was working alone at Briargate School in Cary, Illinois where I was head building custodian.  It was a Saturday, but a basketball program used the gym from 8 am to 9 pm.  I had to be there and was little resentful of not spending Valentine’s Day with my wife.  I was shampooing hall carpets which were incrusted by tracked mud and salt from a winter’s worth of boots.  About 7 pm I got a call on my cell phone, a new-to-me gizmo that seldom went off.  It was from Kathy with the news that my brother was dead. 

It was a shock, but oddly not totally unexpected in that he had abused his body with alcohol and a virtual pharmacopeia of self-prescribed medication for many years.  I was stunned, but went through the motions until the last kid and the last chatty parent was finally locked out of the building.

Two or three days later I was in a car driven by Ira S. Murfin,  Peter’s—he preferred to be called Peter, the Biblical name he had adopted upon entering a religious order years before—son.  My middle daughter Heather Larsen was with us.  We were driving through the night to Cincinnati to make final arrangements and collect whatever was in his “estate”—the few personal belongings he had hauled with him to Ohio after his virtual exile from Oregon.  An odd conversation we had in that car—maybe more of a rambling monologue by me, would become the gist of the opening words of a memorial poem.  More about that later.

The two of us were adopted at birth by W.M. and Ruby Irene Murfin.  Despite being twins, we were not identical.  In fact in many ways we could not have been more different.  Tim was dark haired and so good looking as a child that women stopped my mother on the street to compliment her.  I was larger, blond, and from the beginning oafish.  In school I was simultaneously a loud know-it-all showing off all of the hours of reading I did while still managing to fail at math and spelling.  I had no friends and was a magnet for bullies.

Tim was not a star student or an athlete.  He none the less exuded a kind of charisma.  Other kids swirled around him, naturally following his interests.  From always being Roy Rogers in the neighborhood cowboy games, to being the 12 year old leader of Cheyenne’s sidewalk surfers, to being the first guy in town with a Beatle haircut and Nehru jacket—and naturally the prettiest girlfriend.

When we moved to Skokie and Niles West High School he and his willowy girlfriend were elected to Prom court.  He planned to be a radio disc jockey and got himself gigs hosting sock hops and basement parties with his portable record player and boxes of 45s. 

I was into newspaper, theater, and increasingly radical politics.  Tim got interested in religion and was soon a leader in Young Life, a denizen of church basement coffee houses, and talking about becoming a minister.  Always, a gaggle of kids followed him.

I went away to college at Shimer.  Tim stayed home, mostly to keep his adoring posse together.  He attended Kendal College, a two year school in Evanston.  I came home a long haired, dope smoking hippy and draft dodger.  It turns out he had discovered marijuana too and the use of hallucinogens as spiritual practice.

After I left Shimer and moved to Chicago, I lived with him a couple of times.  Each time he had a full house of roommates and acolytes.  I was the improvident brother he found room for in an unheated room off of an Old Town kitchen or the unfinished basement of a Rogers Park townhouse.  By then he had grown a patriarchal beard and seemed to be gathering his own hippy cult, which would literally gather at his feet as he smoked a fat one and waxed beatifically on arcane mysteries.

Tim married Arlene, a very nice young woman who worshiped him.  She followed him into an outfit called the Holy Order of Mans, which practiced some sort of mystical catholicism with a small c.  He took the name Peter—the Rock of the Church.  Together they were sent on mission to California.  A few years late Arlene returned to Chicago with their toddler son Ira.

Peter drifted out of the Order and pursued various spiritual paths with complete earnestness.  He lived in Portland and had a day job at an early big box hardware store.  But he yearned to be a saint.  He found folks who thought he might be.  Got into another relationship, had a daughter, Shani and lost that family to bouts of depression and heavy drinking and self-medication.

He cleaned himself up in AA and characteristically became a star.  Soon he was speaking all over Oregon and northern California and re-inventing himself as a spiritually based addiction councilor.  He was making big plans and chasing various gurus and guides looking more for tips on how to become one of them than for enlightenment.  Or so it seemed to me from my great distance in Chicago when he would phone with plans.

Eventually he became a substance abuse specialist with the county department of probation.  He entered another relationship with an adoring older woman with a teen age daughter.  But the depression never went away and he fell off the wagon in secret repeatedly.  Each episode became more intense.  It became harder to hide.

In all of those years I saw Peter only three times.  We came to Missouri where he was asked as an ordained priest by my father to conduct my mother’s funeral.  He did so with grace, although his relationship with my father was strained.  It would become an obsession which he would pour out to me in drunken middle-of-the-night telephone calls. 

In the summer of 1983 just after Kathy and my daughter Maureen was born, Peter stayed with us for a week.  It was also his first visit with his ex-wife and son.  He showed up trim, tanned, and handsome.  His black beard was neatly trimmed, his hair barbered to a fare-thee-well, his clothes West Coast casual sharp.  I was still a scraggly post-hippy in thrift shop clothes and a cowboy hat.  I had the family reputation, well earned, as a heavy drinker.  I did nothing to hide it. Peter was supposedly sober.  But Kathy walked in on him pulling from the fifth of whiskey he had hidden in is bag.  It turned out he was killing a bottle a day or more but never actually seemed drunk. 

The last time I saw him alive was after we had moved to Crystal Lake.  He was back for another visit to Ira and spent most of his time in Chicago, but came up for a couple of days with us.  By this time he was in rougher shape.  He ambled over to St. Thomas Church across the street where Kathy was an active parishioner and RE volunteer, to ask the Priest for permission to say a private mass at their alter.  He explained that he was also “an ordained Priest in the Higher Order of Melchizedek” and required to say mass daily.  He was upset that he was turned down, saying that some priest pal in Portland had let him use his church.  He made Kathy and the girls uncomfortable.

Back in Portland his life slowly unraveled.  The relapses became more frequent, the depression blacker.  He wrecked cars, lost his job.  Normandie stood by him as long as she could, support him in the later years.  But in the end he wrecked that, too.  He exiled himself to a closet of a room in Eugene where some former acolytes tried to help him.  He burned through that, too. 

He was virtually homeless and on the run from the law for failure to pay fines for his traffic accidents.  David Sellers, an old friend who he had met hanging out at WLS radio studios while he was in high school and who had lived with us in that Old Town apartment, offered him a bed in suburban Cincinnati.  He was reportedly trying to get himself together and was apparently sober.  He had settled into regular Catholic worship, but he still received tons of mail from all of the cults and gurus he had associated himself with.  Although he couldn’t find work, he finally got qualified for Social Security Disability.  Just after accomplishing that he came home one day, sat down on his bed and died of a massive heart attack.

To our amazement, drugs were not directly involved, except that long abuse had generally wrecked his health.

Ira, Heather, and I arranged to have him cremated and gathered the boxes of his life time which were crammed in the closet and under the bed of his room.  Tons of mystical books, art work, beads, crystals, candles, vestments, journals in his meticulous calligraphy.  We packed the urn and the stuff and returned to Chicago.  The stuff mostly went into storage, Ira and I each keeping a few items.

We arranged for a Catholic funeral mass at an old Polish parish just west of the Loop.  The Mass was said by, a Milwaukee priest and brother of Arlene’s second husband Michael Brennan.  It was solemn and holy and in a lovely old chaplet.  Peter would have approved.  After the Mass folks got up to testify about him in one way or another.  When my turn came I read a suite of six elegies that I had been working on for weeks.  This is what I read:

Elegies for My Brother

Timothy Peter Murfin

March 17, 1949-February 14, 2004

I.

Hurtling down an Interstate on any black night,

say the route angling south southeast from Gary

for Indianapolis then slung around the racetrack

to Cincinnati, Queen City of the West,

you realize in an instant that this great gray marvel

was not constructed for the likes of us,

mere civilians on inconsequential errands

encapsulated in puny steel,

that it was wrought for Commerce,

for that endless caravan of behemoths

jeweled in red and yellow charging indefatigably

for endless rendezvous with profit,

and that our vagrant desires to come home or to escape,

to begin a new life or repeat by rote an established tedium,

to make love or to break tender hearts,

or on this one night in this one box loose amid that stream,

to unite the living with the dead,

seize an unworthy opportunity to tag along for the ride.

II.

Roy Rogers is dead.

The King of the Cowboys with his nickel plated, pearl handled revolvers

resplendent in pearl snap shirt and neckerchief

with a cockeyed and confident grin,

the hero of every summer morning adventure

with Dale Evans at his side

and Hopalong Cassidy on loan from the two reeler next door,

has fallen from Trigger,

Bullet noses his lifeless sprawl in the dust.

            [Here sing Happy Trails to You]

            Happy trails to you, until we meet again.

Happy trails to you, keep smiling’ on ‘till then.

Who cares about the clouds when we’re together?

Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.

Happy trails to you, till we meet again.

Happy trails to you, ‘till we meet again.

III.

Youth bestows its virtues capriciously,

a dollop of beauty here, audacious valor there,

sweet innocence and brash confidence

doled out as if rationed by a miser,

many seeming to be passed over

and left with only churlish resentment,

bad skin and worse judgment.

But he stood beneath the fountain,

                                    let its waters bathe him in every gift

                                                a dark handsomeness,

                                                                         a dj’s soothing voice,

                                                                                    charm,

                                                                                                charisma,

so that he dazzled his way through life,

gathering around him tight circles

not just of friends, but followers

who dreamed his dreams.

The hippy guru of Sheridan Road,

they gathered as acolytes at his feet

as he sat with Old Testament patriarchal beard,

eyes blazing one moment,

the beatific smile of yoga saint the next,

in hallucinogenic communion.

And I, no account wastrel with dim prospects,

swung on the icy path of an asteroid

orbiting far, far from that blazing Sol.

IV.

One year, just before Christmas,

he wrote from somewhere on the West Coast.

This year, could I send him a blank book,

bound in leather, hand stitched,

virgin velum pages waiting for his pen?

I want, he wrote, to be a Saint

and no mere tablet or collegiate spiral notebook

would be worthy of the great and inspirational words

which he would meticulously enter

in that fine calligraphic print he assumed.

It struck me, even in my heathen ignorance,

that saints had no ambition but simply were.

But I hunted through the stationers until I found the perfect journal,

inscribing on its fly leaf my own haughty judgment—

            See Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1, Verse 2

                                  Vanity of vanities saith the Preacher,

                              All is vanity.

V.

He took his religion like he took the whiskey

that he stashed,

straight from the bottle,

no ice, no diluting soda.

He demanded the real thing,

raw and powerful,

burning the throat on the way down

but leaving a warm belly glow.

He may have wandered here and there

amid crystals and pyramids,

astrologers and New Age frou-frou,

but settled only where the mysteries

were deep and hard.

For him no dallying among the ladies of

Saturday morning yoga and meditation,

no time for the plain/simple Buddhism

of the agnostic heart so embraced by

disappointed Western rationalists,

but the stern, demanding Tibetan school

with spinning prayer wheels,

real gods and real demons,

The Book of the Dead.

And no Vatican II Catholicism for him,

no priests in sweaters named Father Phil,

no guitar masses and suburban congregations in Ban Lon,

no cheap and easy grace,

only the penitent's worn out knees,

the endless rosaries endlessly repeated,

icons,

medals,

                                    Holy Water,

the prophetic apparitions of Mary,

the stigmata of Padre Pio 

in which, if he could,

he would dip his handkerchief

to press to his lips to kiss.

VI.

Something inside of him was broken.

He knew it and spent a questing life

trying to find it,

trying to fix it.

Was it some trauma of childhood,

inflicted by the fragile, damaged woman who raised us

or the god-like but distant father?

             

He often thought so, obsessed over each moment

of remembered agony and rejection,

taking the hard knocks of ordinary childhood

and building an edifice of unremitting pain,

unable to forget what he had constructed,

unable to forgive.

Or, now that Freud has been cast aside as Fraud,

was it just some accident of biochemistry,

a roll of the dice that elected him

by alchemy of genetic chance

to have neurons that misfire just so?

As a former Friend of Bill W

did he have to assume responsibility

and seize control of the disease himself,

or did the pickling years of hidden bottles,

the various stews of pharmaceuticals prescribed

and self-prescribed

finally overcome that mind?

       Was it all three?

       Does it matter?

He was broken and tried to repair himself as best he could

and in the process leaned how to balm the wounds

of other troubled souls,

but like the Physician, could not heal himself.