Drinking in America Quotes

“The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“On the voyage from England, beer was their everything. Beer was their fruit and their vegetables in a diet that otherwise consisted of bread, cheese, and meat. Beer was their yogurt with its healing enzymes, and beer was their medicinal spirit. Beer was their water, and beer was their, well, beer.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“There wasn’t much good to say about the voyage. Five weeks in, with no land in sight, the scanty provisions began to run out. This was a concern for passengers, and also for sailors who were traditionally promised a gallon of beer a day as part of their sailing wages. They could do without food; they could not do without drink.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“By the eighteenth century the colonists were less focused on God and more focused on profits. Gone was their piety as well as their distaste for local fish—a distaste which had led dozens of them to starve to death. Gone was their high-minded religiosity. Drinking had been part of what changed them along with adversity, rage at authority, and the tremendous abundance of the New World. They were no longer men and women wedded to freedom of belief. Now they were a community devoted to trade, eating, and drinking.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“The people should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable and striking.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“There was a feeling that voters should be repaid in booze for the effort of voting.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Upon all the new settlements the Spaniards make, the first thing they do is build a church,” wrote the British captain Thomas Walduck in 1708. “The first thing the Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing the English do, be it in the most remote part of the world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a tavern or drinking house.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“This tension between the colonists’ unabashed enjoyment of drink and their contempt for drunkenness was soon expressed in a series of laws, which are still part of the split American character.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Drinking, as Eric Burns writes, was our first national pastime—long before baseball was invented.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Desperate for beer, they ignored the abundant freshwater. Even the Bible advised against drinking water in Saint Paul’s epistle to Timothy: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and for thine own infirmities.”27”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“that in the Nixon era the United States was, in essence, a ‘rogue state.’ It had a ruthless, paranoid, and unstable leader who did not hesitate to break the laws of his own country in order to violate the neutrality, menace the territorial integrity, or destabilize the internal affairs of other nations. At the close of this man’s reign, in an episode more typical of a banana republic or a ‘peoples’ democracy,’ his own secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, had to instruct the Joint Chiefs of Staff to disregard any military order originating in the White House.”266”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“McCarthy’s drinking and his arrogance were finally his downfall—he flew too close to the sun. As chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he went after the State Department and the Voice of America. His tactics were always the same—bluster replaced reason.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“John Berryman, put it, “Something has been said for sobriety, but very little.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Seven thousand arrests for alcohol possession in New York City between 1921 and 1923 (when enforcement was more or less openly abandoned) resulted in only seventeen convictions.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Twenty-first-century American writers do not drink much.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“John Barleycorn’s final words: “I’ve had more friends in private and more foes in public than any other man in America.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“having tried and failed to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past”178”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“General Grant is a great general,” he said. “I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Hooker was falsely thought to be the origin of the word for “prostitute,” because his camp was so rowdy.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Taylor Barnum. After he died, it was said that he was more alive than anyone still living.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“In 1820, the average amount an individual drank in one day was more than three times the average today.119”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Although they sometimes claim objectivity, historians are the most subjective of all writers. Hidden behind the thousands of facts unearthed by research, they safely arrange the world to reflect their own vision.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“The War of Independence was not a heroic enterprise but the result of a political miscalculation.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“got a return on his investment of almost two votes per gallon.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“as a “crafty and lecherous old hypocrite.”45”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Gazette described his competitor,”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“the American nation has been debauched by [George] Washington.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“early colonist columnist wrote, “If ever a nation was debauched by a man,”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“Not drunk is he who from the floor, / Can rise again and still drink more, / But drunk is he who prostrate lies, / Without the power to drink or rise.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History

“When they established a college—Harvard, in 1636—they equipped it with its own brewery.”
― Susan Cheever, Drinking in America: Our Secret History