Esther Mobley

Our conflicted relationship with alcohol.

A year ago, as stayathome orders came down in the Bay Area and then throughout the country, Americans reacted to their new homebound states by buying and drinking a whole lot of booze.

The numbers were dramatic. The week of March 15, 2020, alcohol sales jumped 54% year over year, according to Nielsen, and online alcohol sales by 262%. A Bay Area homebreathalyzer company said that in the first week, it observed a 42% rise in locals’ blood alcohol content.

Ever since, alcohol has been a quiet, constant presence underlying the larger story of the pandemic, in ways that alternately celebrate and condemn its role in our lives. At the beginning, we reveled in our drinking, clinking our “quarantinis” and cheering when states like California relaxed alcohol regulations to allow takeout cocktails as a lifeline to struggling restaurants. But the past year also saw a surge of interest in sobriety. At least 13% of people intend to take a month off drinking in 2021, according to a new Wine Market Council poll. The market for lowand noalcohol drink options is booming like never before, expected to grow 31% by 2024, according to drinksindustry analyst IWSR. Despite the boom in earlypandemic alcohol sales, yearend data eventually suggested that drinking had not significantly risen during 2020 overall.

This whiplash is dramatic, but to those who have been paying attention, it isn’t surprising. For centuries, Americans have been volleying back and forth between drunkenness and sobriety, between indulgence and temperance. America has at times been the drunkest nation, by some measurements. It’s also been one of the few to ban liquor entirely. “I think it reflects the ambivalent relationship we’ve always had with alcohol on both the personal and societal level,” says Tim Naimi, an alcohol epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center, of the pandemic era.

In fact, throughout history America’s conflicted view toward alcohol has been a potent expression of America itself, conveying cultural values that often contradict each other — unity and individualism, selfimprovement and selfdetermination. The attitudes toward alcohol during the pandemic have simply put this dynamic into clearer focus.

Throughout the coronavirus crisis, alcohol has been both a balm for isolation and a tool for human connection; it’s been a coping mechanism for desperate times, but has also presented greaterthannormal dangers for some people who are in recovery. And there’s reason to believe that the current moment, in which our culture is bending back toward temperance, is merely a precursor to another binge.

The obsession with booze goes back at least as far as the Mayflower touching down at Plymouth Rock, says Susan Cheever, author of “Drinking in America: Our Secret History.” The real reason that the pilgrims docked in Plymouth instead of their intended destination of Virginia, Cheever writes, was that the ship was about to run out of grog and needed to restock before the sailors, who were entitled to a daily ration of drink, staged a mutiny.

“It’s amazing how much of American history was influenced by both people being drunk and people thinking that drunk was a terrible thing to be,” Cheever says.

By the time an American republic was forming, publichealth advocates were already worried that it would drink itself to death. The average colonist spent a quarter of his income on booze, according to Cheever. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s preeminent physician — the Dr. Fauci of his day — published a pamphlet in 1784 warning that excessive consump

“It’s amazing how much of American history was influenced by both people being drunk and people thinking that drunk was a terrible thing to be.”

Susan Cheever, author of “Drinking in America: Our Secret History”

tion was leading the country to such vices as fighting, stealing, murder, “HorseRacing” and “peevishness.”

But instead of sobering up, by the 1830s, the average American consumed 7 gallons of pure alcohol per year. Children drank “flip,” a concoction of grain alcohol and fruit juice, on their way to school. And a temperance movement rose to meet it: By 1834, Cheever writes, there were 5,000 temperance societies nationwide with 11 million members. Women drove this temperance movement, hoping that curbing alcohol consumption would make women safer by protecting them from domestic violence at the hands of violent husbands.

“In 1830 we were arguably the drunkest country in the world, and by 1930 we’d outlawed it entirely,” Cheever says. “That tells you everything.”

Much of the public support for Prohibition grew out of a desire for national unity and discipline, but then disobedience of Prohibition morphed into its own kind of American mythology, an assertion of one’s selfdetermination in defiance of the law. Bootleggers like Al Capone became folk heroes. The appeal of this disobedience endures in popular culture today; people are still opening “speakeasies.” It was in this era that problematic drinking became vaunted as a sign of creative genius. Five U.S. writers who were Nobel laureates — Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck — were known alcoholics.

America’s lovehate dynamic with alcohol only ballooned from there. The sodden glamour of scotchfueled power lunches in the 1960s led to a neotemperance movement in the 1980s: “Mad Men” yielded to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Antialcohol laws swept the nation. In 1984, Congress raised the drinking age to 21; Massachusetts banned happy hours; New Jersey said it would hold party hosts accountable for drunken guests’ behavior. Between 1980 and 1987, liquor consumption dropped 23%.

From Prohibition to “Just Say No,” the 20th century temperance discourse framed alcohol as a matter of public safety. But few powerful temperance groups remain, and the formal antialcohol movement has now lost steam. Today, those who oppose alcohol consumption characterize it less as a public menace and more as a personal one. Sobriety — or even just the idea of cutting back on alcohol — has been subsumed under the everexpanding umbrella of wellness culture, as part of a lifestyle that might also include kombucha, glutenfree eating and mindfulness meditation.

Predictably, the alcohol industry has seized this opportunity, rushing to market all sorts of drinks as healthy. The last couple of years have given rise to “clean” wine, sessionable cocktails, athleteoriented beers and lowcalorie hard seltzer. Nielsen data shows nonalcoholic wine sales up 34% as of last month, and nonalcoholic beer up 39%. The messaging appears to be working on a notinsignificant segment of consumers: 18% of respondents to a recent Wine Market Council survey said that they considered wine and hard seltzer to be a good option when dieting.

The social pressure of wellness culture is its own kind of temperance movement. Part of its contemporary effect has been to destigmatize, and even glamorize, sobriety, which is proudly practiced by celebrities from Bradley Cooper to Chrissy Teigen. Donald Trump and Joe Biden share few commonalities, but one is that they’re both teetotalers.

At first glance, this soft temperance movement might seem to have more staying power than the crusade that led to Prohibition. In some ways, it has defeminized the idea of sobriety, making it less about women’s safety and more about personal optimization. (Reckless intoxication is no longer the harbinger of masculinity it once was.) Wellness culture also presents sobriety as much more palatable than the allornothing approaches of the past, which saw activists like Carrie Nation brandishing hatchets in saloons.

Yet the current trend toward temperance, in true American fashion, is already showing signs of slingshotting back in the other direction. Some analysts have forecast a return to “Roaring Twenties”style debauchery once COVID19 vaccines are more widespread and distancing restrictions are lifted, following a similar pattern to what happened after the 1918 pandemic. In some cities, it’s already happening. We may be doomed to volley back and forth through more cycles of famine and excess. Nothing about America is moderate; why should we expect its drinking to be?

“Our country’s relationship to alcohol is kind of magnificent and glorious and it speaks to who we are as Americans,” says Cheever. America is polarized and passionate — sometimes flagrantly drunk, sometimes selfrighteously judgmental. It’s also a place of experimentation. We’re still trying to get it right.