Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman
Judging by the
full-page cartoon in the October 27, 1911, edition of The
Illinois Issue, a decade or so
after the frontier days otherwise known as “the Wild West,”
saloons weren't just watering holes; they were pretty much all that
is wrong with life, at least as it was lived west of the Mississippi.
The
11 cartoons that the newspaper reprints from the complete set of 30
featured in M. A. Waterman's pamphlet, Say! What Has the
Saloon Done for You?, may be a
mere sample, but they're enough to suggest that the dangers of the
saloon are, indeed, many, varied, and terrible.
In
the first sketch, a sign pointing the way along a narrow route
through the prairie reads “To the Poor House,” and the drawing's
caption remarks, “The SALOON keeps the grass from growing over the
road OVER THE HILL.” (Why the qualifying phrase “OVER THE HILL”
was thought necessary is anybody's guess.)
The
second cautionary cartoon, featuring a robust figure in a costume of
horizontal stripes, his leg chained to an unseen post or wall, sits
atop the rock that he breaks into smaller pieces with his hammer. The
caption? “The SALOON has deprived me of my liberty.” Although the
logic may be fallacious, the picture of life after drink isn't
pretty.
In
the next illustration, a personified building labeled “Jail” does
the talking, advising readers that “The SALOON is responsible for
my being 'full,' see?” Despite the fact that the jail appears more
abandoned than occupied, one might
suppose that there's a connection between saloons and jails.
Next,
a flea-bitten dog, scratching at the insect that torments him, speaks
on behalf of temperance, arguing, rather speciously, perhaps—he is
a dog, after all—that “the SALOON makes the same kind of business
for a town that FLEAS make for me.”
It's
unclear whether a woman, sleeves rolled as she scrubs laundry on a
washboard in a sudsy tub, is herself the irresponsible villain or her
husband, if she's married, is the drunk. Her comment, too, is
ambiguous: “The SALOON,” she complains, “has forced me to work
steadily at this.”
Next,
a politician with two faces blames his condition on watering holes:
“The SALOON has made me two-faced,” he declares. Like the
(originally) conjoined twins in an early draft of Mark Twain's novel
Puddn'head Wilson,
before they were separated into two individuals, one face appears to
be a non-smoker, while the other puffs away on a cigarette.
The
other drawings, equally fallacious, also blame the woes of their
characters on an inanimate object, the hapless saloon, as if the
mere existence of a barroom has “forced” its patrons to adopt the
habits that torment them. The arguments may not be persuasive, except
to a prohibitionist, but they are
fanciful, offering not only the two-faced politician, but a fat cat
brewer, a boa constrictor that appears to think it's a scarf, and the
same rhetorical question, repeated with each drawing, which gives the
set its title: “Say! What has the SALOON done for you?,” makes it
clear that, if the reader's own deficiency isn't represented by any
of the plights depicted in the drawings, the SALOON, very likely, has
done something else
for the poor, unfortunate soul.
Perhaps
Mr. Waterman held back a few such maladies, having had a sequel in
mind.
