The battles over voting rules are getting silly and promise to get sillier. Among the provisions in Georgia’s new election law is a rule stating no one is to “give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector.” This has been met with outrage — not the part restricting the distribution of cash money but the notion that polling place Samaritans will be denied the opportunity to hand out water to the thirsty masses.
Worry about water if you like, but I am disappointed that conservatives have missed an opportunity to celebrate and emulate the Founding Fathers. You see, the great American tradition was nothing so inhospitable, so ungenerous, as to ply voters with water. Water?! No, the habit come election day, a practice borrowed from the British but made more boisterous by the colonials, was to “treat” the electorate with as much liquor as it could stomach.
Legend has it that the essential American failed in his first bid for public office for want of whiskey. George Washington ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses but refused to provide refreshment, having “entered the arena of politics as a temperance candidate; opposing tippling houses and general drunkenness.” He finished far behind one Thomas Swearingen, described as “the friend of the tavern-keepers.” Alternatively, Washington was the enemy of a particular clan of would-be tavern-keepers, the Lindsays, whose bid for a liquor license he had opposed. They are said to have poured freely from the flowing bowl to see their nemesis defeated at the polls.
When next he stood for office, Washington was out soldiering, but at least he was no longer the killjoy candidate. The colonel was camped with his men near Fort Cumberland in July 1758 when he received the news he had been elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. He had chosen to campaign with his troops rather than campaign for votes. This latter task he left in the capable hands of his friends. One of them was a Lt. Charles Smith, who kept the booze books detailing what was owed to cover the Election Day bar bill.
There were five separate accounts. The first was for 40 gallons of rum punch, 15 gallons of wine, and “Dinner for your Friends.” The second was for 13 ½ gallons of wine, 3 ½ pints of brandy, 13 gallons of “Bear,” eight quarts cyder royal, and more punch. The third was 30 gallons of strong beer. The fourth was one hogshead and one barrel of punch “consisting of 26 gallons best Barbadoes rum” and 12 ½ pounds of sugar, plus six gallons of the best Madeira wine, and, lastly, three gallons and three quarts of beer, 10 bowls of punch, nine half-pints of rum, and one pint of wine.
This practice was long established in the colonies. In early 18th-century elections in North Carolina, “unqualified” persons came to vote and drink. As one historian put it, “The rabble was treated to good liquor, rum, and brandy.” In Connecticut, the election festivities were so riotous that the government tried to co-opt them, serving official rum-raisin “election cake” and hard cider.
By the early 20th century, “treating” the electorate had ceased to be legal. There are records of vote-wranglers in Texas who were prosecuted for nothing more sinister than gathering up foot-sore voters and giving them rides to the polls — oh yes, and making nice with the whiskey on the way. By then, the whole enterprise was looked down on. One of Carry Nation’s crowd declared, “In our state, we do not apply the term ‘man’ to the low, degrading creature whose vote can be bought by a drink of ‘cheap election whiskey.’”
How much cheaper the bargain if the vote is bought by a drink of distilled water.
Which is why I propose, to any state engaged in rewriting its election code, that an exception be made to allow voters to be treated to drink, as long as that drink is punch made with the best Barbados rum or a cool glass of Madeira wine.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
