STIGMA

by bob k. 

We live in a boozy culture.

There is a stigma that falls upon the folks who don’t drink at all and a different prejudice against those who drink too much. How much is “too much” depends a lot on who is doing the defining. Of course, there’s a stigma in being a person who used to drink too much and now drinks no alcohol at all. Newly sober alcoholics often find that drinks are pushed at them at social events and it may be best, to the extent possible, to dodge such gatherings in the early going.

The stigma against non-drinkers is easing in recent years. Phenomena such as “Sober Curious” and “Dry January” have made the eschewal of booze in its many forms to be something “cool,” at least in some circles. In other circles, soda-only drinkers remain suspect and might find themselves branded as squares, cheapos, religious nutbars, or reformed problem drinkers. OMG! I hope Nina doesn’t start preaching! There’s some warranted ill will towards overly enthusiastic steppers wanting one and all to dance their dance.

There is definitely some prejudice against alcoholics and some suspicion even of those claiming to be sober. Celebrities have been interviewed on television about their newfound sobriety while in an obvious state of inebriation. Often they’d slur something about attending 12-step meetings and taking it all one day at a time —whatever the PR professional had coached them to say. Such public instances of hypocrisy damage the credibility of less renowned people who have genuinely stopped drinking or taking drugs.

Even without highly publicized celebrity relapses, those less than famous folks might also fall under suspicion about their professed sobriety. Did Charles miss the neighborhood bash because he was afraid to be around booze, or was he too drunk to come, just like two years ago?

Whatever the stigma in 2024, the negative feelings about alcoholic drinkers used to be much worse.

Colonial Times and Early America

Drunkards have been pilloried, mocked, fined, dragged by the heels through dust, mud and cesspools, flogged and humiliated, all to only limited effect. In some areas, strict laws were enacted prohibiting chronic inebriates from getting married and having children. The unfortunate offspring of drunkards were viewed as suffering from the double curse of bad genetics and extremely poor parenting. In many jurisdictions, the alcoholic was considered insane and subject to incarceration in asylums at any time. Many were banished from their towns and counties.

Sunday morning sermons railed against chronic alcohol abusers. Inebriates were among the worst of sinners. “Most Americans saw excessive drinking as a simple lack of will. If people wanted to stay sober, the argument went, they would.” (history.org) Drunkenness was considered to be a matter of choice – a misbehavior that fell under the purview of clergymen and legislators.

Francis J. Galton — Eugenics

Charles Darwin’s cousin dropped out of medical school to study mathematics at Cambridge. Almost one hundred years after Benjamin Rush published the pamphlet An Inquiry into the Effects of Spiritous Liquors Upon the Human Body, and Their Influence Upon the Happiness of Society, Francis Galton went to press with An Inquiry into Human Faculty and Development. Galton had begun with a kinder, gentler version of eugenics than what was to come later.

“In a flourish, Galton invented a term that would tantalize his contemporaries, inspire his disciples, obsess his later followers, and eventually slash through the twentieth century like a sword.” (War Against the Weak, Edwin Black)

In 1883, Darwin’s cousin coined the term “eugenics” to describe a social philosophy of manipulating heredity scientifically. “Later, a ‘negative eugenics’ branch of this movement sought to decrease or eliminate breeding by those judged to be the most unfit of human stock. Negative eugenics grew out of the 19th Century notion of degenerationism, the belief that most social problems, such as alcoholism, crime, feeblemindedness, insanity, laziness, and poverty, were passed on biologically in more severe forms in each new generation.”
Slaying The Dragon, William L. White, p. 120

Darwinism had spawned social Darwinism which had adherents such as Herbert Spencer of “contempt prior to investigation” fame. Spencer denounced charity and instead, extolled the purifying elimination of the unfit. Reverend Justin Edwards had said the purpose of the Temperance Movement wasn’t to reform drunkards – it was to urge the temperate to remain so. “Let the unreformed continue to drink and when they die the problem will be solved.”

Reverend Edwards ideas are echoed in eugenic theory which posited that, by taking an attitude of benign neglect, alcoholics would die off through the process of natural selection. A more radical view favored speeding things along through marriage bans, exclusion of degenerate immigrants, sexually segregated institutionalization, and state-funded sterilization for drunkards and other undesirables.

American eugenicists believed the unfit were essentially sub-human, not worthy of developing as members of society. The unfit were diseased, something akin to a genetic infection. This infection was to be quarantined and then eliminated. Their method of choice was selective breeding – spaying and cutting away the undesirable while carefully mating and grooming the prize stock.
War Against the Weak, Chapter 3, Edwin Black

Sterilization

Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing…

To perpetuate the campaign, widespread academic fraud combined with almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological rationales for persecution…

Employing a hazy amalgam of questionable, falsified information and polysyllabic academic arrogance, the eugenics movement slowly constructed a national and juridical infrastructure to cleanse America of its unfit.

 …Mandatory sterilization laws were enacted in some twenty-seven states to prevent individuals from reproducing more of their kind … the goal was to immediately sterilize fourteen million people in the United States and millions more worldwide … Ultimately, some 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized and the total is probably much higher … Eugenics wore the mantle of respectable science to mask its true character.

                  War Against the Weak, Edwin Black, Introduction

A variety of physical methods of treatment were introduced in the period 1840-1950. The most dramatic of these solutions was sterilization.

This idea developed within a broader framework of social and “expert” attitudes that filled journals and the popular press that “parents addicted to alcohol and other drugs begat children with vulnerability to inebriety, feeblemindedness, prostitution and criminality, psychic manias, and an unending list of physical infirmities. As early as 1888, Clum identified alcoholism as the primary cause of insanity, idiocy, pauperism, criminality, and disease.” (Dragon, p. 120)

One of the leading physicians of the era in the treatment of alcoholism was Dr. T.D. Crothers. His 1902 depiction of the moral corruption of the offspring of alcoholics was typical of what was to be found in the literature. “Often the higher moral faculties of the person are undeveloped, and the children of alcoholized people are born criminals without consciousness of right and wrong, and with a feeble sense of duty and obligation.” (T.D. Crothers)                     

Nazis

In alcohol, we have to recognize one of the most dreadful causes of the degeneration of mankind.
Adolf Hitler

In July 1933, Germany passed the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” which called for the sterilization of human beings considered to be polluters of the gene pool. “Ernst Rudin, a psychiatrist and enthusiastic protagonist of compulsory sterilization for psychopaths and the ‘whole, great army’ of incorrigible criminals in Nazi Germany, called for the sterilization of incurable alcoholics as well.” (Criminals and Their Scientists, Becker & Wetell, p. 480)

During the Nazi regime in Germany, 20,000 to 30,000 alcoholic women were subjected to forced sterilization. A total of 400,000 “undesirables” were sterilized. That the “master race” folks were sufficiently disturbed by the enormous social costs of alcoholism to take such draconian measures is less startling than the fact that similar steps were being taken in Freedom’s Land.

In 1934, the Richmond Times-Dispatch quoted a prominent American eugenicist as saying the Germans are beating us at our own game.

At the Nuremberg Trials, many Nazis defended their actions by indicating that their inspiration had come from similar policies in the United States, “the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics.” (Eugenics And Its Relevance To Contemporary Health Care, Nursing Ethics, Rachel Iredale, 2000)

California

The sterilization of alcoholics was part of a broader program targeting the mentally ill, intellectually disabled, blind, deaf, epileptic, and in some areas, Blacks. Promiscuous women were sometimes sterilized under the guise of being “feeble-minded.” Several states passed laws allowing for this practice, but rates were low until a 1927 Supreme Court decision legitimized eugenic sterilization. The practice slowed following a second Supreme Court decision in 1942, striking down the punitive sterilization of criminals.

By 1956, 27 states still had pro-sterilization laws on their books. “California forcibly sterilized 20,000 people from 1909 to 1963… The goal was to rid society of people labeled feeble-minded or defective.” (cnn.com) In total, 65,000 individuals in 33 states were sterilized. We do not know the precise number sterilized as the result of being labelled “alcoholic.”

Part of the reason why the eugenics movement caught on so rapidly was because of the failure of the many ineffective reformatory and other programs designed to help the poor, criminals, and people with mental and physical problems.

Electroshock

Dr. Ladislas J. Meduna noted that agitation and depression lessened in the aftermath of seizures, and in 1934 the Hungarian neuropathologist began experimenting with chemically inducing grand mal seizures in schizophrenics. Some favorable results were achieved, and the psychiatric world was startled, as the disease had previously been considered incurable. The chemical treatments were abandoned after a short time owing to the “harsh collateral effects.” In its place, “convulsive therapy” moved on to electricity to generate seizures. Many alcoholics were forced to undergo electroshock therapy.

At around the same time, leucotomy, or lobotomy as it became known, became popular as a treatment for all forms of obsessional neuroses, including alcoholism. The enthusiasm for these procedures as therapy for mental illnesses is not remembered as medicine’s finest hour.

Those concerned with the stigma against alcoholics in modern society can take some consolation in the fact that in previous generations, it was much, much worse.

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bob k. is the author of Key Players in AA History and The Secret Diaries of Bill W., both published by AA Agnostica. Research into the pre-AA world of alcoholism and addiction treatment came up with this gruesome story. For more about drinkers and drinking prior to 1935, watch for Almost Hopeless: Pre-AA Efforts to Reform America’s Alcoholics coming soon to an Amazon near you.

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