<\/p>\n
We often hear alarming statements about the population of Maine and many of us await the 1960 census with much curiosity. Is Maine actually losing population? Will there be fewer people in the state in’ 1960 than there were in 1950. My guess — and it is a guess based on trends — is that the 1960 census will show more people in the state than were here ten years ago, and that for the first time the state’s total population may then exceed a million. That is because the population in Maine’s larger communities seems to be offsetting the loss in small towns.<\/p>\n
In 1950 Maine had only 74 communities with a population of more than 2,500. Now the interesting fact is that between 1940 and 1950 only 12 of those 74 towns and cities failed to show a gain in population. Those twelve communities were distributed through seven of Maine’s sixteen counties. The largest number, three each, were in Washington and Piscataquis. In the first county, Calais, Eastport and Lubec, the county’s three largest places, all lost population. The same was true in the three Piscataquis communities of Dover-Foxcroft, Milo and Millinocket. In Aroostook, while Houlton, Presque Isle, Caribou and Fort Fairfield all showed gains, the towns on the St. John river, with the exception of Madawaska, all lost a number of people. The larger towns of Van Buren and Fort Kent both lost. The counties which had one large town losing population were Cumberland, where the town was Bridgton; York, where it was the town of York itself; Somerset, where it was Madison and Kennebec, where surprisingly the losing large town was Oakland.<\/p>\n
But while those twelve towns were losing population, just note what was happening in the other 62 towns and cities with more than 2,500 people. Portland had gained 4,000 persons between 1940 and 1950. Auburn had gained 2,500, and Lewiston 2,500; Bangor had increased by 2,000. The biggest gain had been in South Portland, which in the ten years between 1940 and 1950 added nearly 6,000 people. Other places where the increase was more than a thousand were Augusta, Biddeford, Brunswick, Caribou, Hampden, Kittery, Old Orchard, Orono, Presque Isle, Saco, Scarborough, Waterville and Westbrook.<\/p>\n
Now all of us know that some of those places, especially Saco and Biddeford, have been hard hit, but it is possible that the 1960 census will show their losses to be offset by gains in the areas where the Armed Services have air bases — Brunswick, Bangor, Presque Isle and Limestone — and the towns adjoining those in which the bases are situated. For instance, the Bangor base greatly affects Hampden and Hermon, while the Limestone base is rapidly boosting the population of Caribou.<\/p>\n
Well, anyhow, it will be interesting to see what the 1960 census will reveal about the population of Maine.<\/p>\n
A hundred years ago Maine gained much renown as the first state to pass a law prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquor. For more than eighty years that law had the support of a majority of Maine voters and was never repealed until National Prohibition was itself repealed 25 years ago.<\/p>\n
Most of you know that the leader of the prohibition movement in Maine was General Neal Dow of Portland. But it is wrong to believe that the movement began with Dow. For centuries people had realized the evils resulting from intoxicants. There are plenty of references to alcoholism in the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments.<\/p>\n
Perhaps you did not know that the settlement at Boston was only six years old, and the Pilgrims had been at Plymouth only 16 years, when there was passed the first law to regulate liquor in Maine. It happened this way. In 1622 Ferdinando Gorges had obtained from the Council for New England certain rights to lands in New England. He was himself a charter member of the original Plymouth Company, which enabled the Pilgrims to settle at Plymouth in 1620. In 1635 the Plymouth Colony surrendered its charter, and soon afterward Gorges received from King James I a royal charter giving him control over the Province of Maine, that is all the British claimed land between the Piscataqua and the Sagadahoc, which was the old name for the Kennebec below Merrymeeting Bay.<\/p>\n
By that charter Gorges became a sort of feudal lord, and he established his seat of government at York, to which he gave the glorified name of Georgiana and made it the first incorporated city in America. Gorges’ government at York enacted and proceeded to enforce certain laws. The five judges of Gorges’ court at York served as makers as well as enforcers of law. In March, 1636 they enacted the first liquor law ever heard of in Maine. It must have been a hard law to enforce, for it forbade any man to serve strong liquor or wine in his house except to invited guests or to laborers, for one hour at dinner upon a working day.<\/p>\n
Very early in colonial times there were laws forbidding the sale of liquor to Indians, but all through the long period of Maine’s Indian wars, such laws were poorly enforced. In fact both the English and the French deliberately used liquor to persuade the Indians to their side, and both paid for scalps, not only with guns and wampum, but often with rum.<\/p>\n
Even before Maine became a state in 1820 temperance societies were flourishing in Portland and Brunswick, in Augusta and Waterville, and even in far-away Machias. Those early societies advocated moderation, not total abstinence. It was all right to drink, but wrong to drink too much.<\/p>\n
In 1837 dissension broke out within the Maine Temperance Society, with which the local societies in Maine towns had long been affiliated. Believers in total abstinence, as the only sound solution to the liquor evil, were defeated when in that year the state society refused to alter its stand for moderation, not endorse complete prohibition. The dissenters broke away and formed a separate organization, the Maine Temperance Union.<\/p>\n
It was in that same year, 1837, that Neal Dow started a campaign in Portland to change the method of granting local licenses to sell liquor. It took him five years of constant crusading to achieve success, but when that victory came, it went far beyond Dow’s original intent. In 1837 he had wanted only honestly controlled licensing. His repeated defeats and the increasing prevalence of drunkenness in Portland, combined with the graft and corruption he found associated with the traffic, had gradually driven Dow to the endorsement of outright prohibition. By 1842 the citizens of Portland had been persuaded by this gallant crusader and his ardent followers that drastic action must be taken. By a vote of 943 to 498 the retail sale of all intoxicants was forbidden within the limits of the City of Portland.<\/p>\n
Then with the help of a noted Whig leader, John Walton, and of the editor of the Kennebec Journal, Luther Severance, Dow turned his attention to the entire state of Maine. He travelled 4,000 miles in two months, through heavy winter storms. Dow made it a non-partisan campaign, enlisting both Whigs and Democrats under his banner.<\/p>\n
Maine’s first law, attempting to control the sale of liquor on a statewide basis, was passed in 1846. That law set up a plan of legalized liquor agents, who had the sole right to sell alcoholic beverages in the community. Up to 1,000 inhabitants, a town had a single agent; from 1,000 to 3,000 people gave a town two agents; and for each additional 3,000 people another agent up to a maximum of five.<\/p>\n
On this program several years ago I told how I by chance found the records of the Waterville liquor agent for the year 1847. It was the book in which had been pasted the first prescriptions of the old drug store in the Phoenix Block on the west side of Main Street — a pharmacy operated on that spot for more than a hundred years before it was moved across the street to its present location by Lary, its current proprietor.<\/p>\n
The town liquor agent could legally sell liquor for medicinal and mechanical purposes only. Though some physicians may have given prescriptions too freely, the medical profession did not contain the worst offenders against the law. A mere glance at a druggist’s prescriptions as late as 1850 will reveal how easy it was to get them. To my amazement I found that some of those early Waterville prescriptions had not even been signed by a physician. Apparently, if a man was well known, he could just make out his own prescription. And, as has almost always been the case, enforcement varied with the different communities.<\/p>\n
Neal Dow, incensed at the way the law was being flouted in Portland, decided to run for Mayor of the city and close up the rum shops. He was elected by almost a two to one majority. A few days after the election a Portland newspaper, the Eastern Argus, commented: “Neal Dow was elected Mayor last Monday with a rush. There was considerable stir among the rummies along Fore Street,\u00b7 when the result was known.”<\/p>\n
After Dow’s inauguration the Portland Transcript said: “Our new mayor does not favor the building of a new and spacious almshouse, but insists the present building will accommodate all paupers if the illegal traffic in liquor can be effectively reduced. Any measure which the City Government chooses to adopt to control that evil traffic will have his support.”<\/p>\n
Mayor Dow proceeded to clean up Portland. Persistent violators were not only fined, but given jail sentences. Bootlegging of course continued, but at such risk that many of the operators moved to other towns. Neal Dow showed that, while hundred percent enforcement of any law is not likely, prohibition can be enforced by honest officials with the support of the better part of the citizenry.<\/p>\n
When the 1851 legislature went into session, a group of its members were interested in getting a better and tighter prohibitory law for the state. They asked Neal Dow to come to Augusta and help them draft a bill. The result was Maine’s famous prohibitory law, signed by Gov. Hubbard on June 2, 1851. It prohibited the manufacture or sale of liquor anywhere in the state, but allowed the city authorities or the selectmen to permit one, and only one, pharmacist in each town or city to sell liquors for mechanical and medical purposes. To encourage enforcement, all fines went to the arresting and prosecuting officers.<\/p>\n
Subsequent years would see many changes in details of the law, but the fundamental philosophy of the 1851 statute prevailed for 80 years — the philosophy that the solution of the liquor problem lies not in moderation and control, but in complete prohibition. It was abandonment of that philosophy which forced Maine to go along with the other states when the noble experiment of 1918, National Prohibition, was abandoned in the 1930’s.<\/p>\n
There are of course many temperance leaders today, notably in the WCTU, who believe that prohibition is still the only effective solution, but the majority of people who are deeply concerned about alcoholism, drunken driving and other evils connected with the traffic, apparently believe as did the old Temperance Society of Maine in 1837, that it is all right to drink if one doesn’t drink too much. It may just be true, you know, that alcohol today is a greater evil, affecting a larger percentage of the population, than it was in Neal Dow’s day, just because it is so generally accepted that moderate drinking is socially desirable.<\/p>\n
To whichever philosophy we subscribe. we must face the fact that changing times bring changing customs, that we are living in 1959, not in 1851. But we must also face the grim fact that in 1851 nobody tried to mix alcohol with gasoline to put murder on the highways and nobody pretended then that an hour of dinner must be preceded by two hours of cocktails.<\/p>\n
Year: 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #415, Broadcast on April 5, 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[800,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7954"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}