A View of the Saloon

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.