When I started college in the early 1990s, drinking was part of the deal. We lived in the Pitt freshman dorms – the Towers, which had rooms shaped like Trivial Pursuit game pieces. For this reason the six pieces of furniture we were given between two people just couldn’t quite fit. This in itself made drinking a way of coping.
So when I was busted for drinking the night before my freshman year began, I wish I had had that excuse in my back pocket – as opposed to my student ID. But we get over this.
What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that this problem had existed since universities in America were a thing. Edgar Allan Poe ran up debts at the University of Virginia because of his relationship with booze. While trying to get thrown out of West Point later on, he found that booze gave him the license to help purvey that goal and helped him show up to formation drunk and naked and since the army doesn’t love individualism, you know. Thomas Jefferson left the responsibility of drinking up to the students and then burst into tears months later in front of them when he realized just how bad of an idea this was. According to one student’s diary, it was not unusual to see students so drunk that they couldn’t walk to class. It was probably best for all involved that they didn’t get there.
Young people experiencing freedom for the first time often experiment with booze and realized that these things go together like peanut butter and jelly – gin mixed with tonic. The fact that they aren’t allowed to do it makes it all the more fun and all the more mythical. Smuggling cans of beer under a resident assistant’s nose was a wee thrill. Getting into a bar at nineteen was like being entered into a new world. These feelings don’t change, no matter when they happened.
Enter Prohibition. 1920. America. Now, drinking isn’t a thing young students can’t do, it’s a thing Americans can’t do.
Just as the rules of not drinking bring out the ingenuity of young wannabe drinkers, Prohibition brought out the ingenuity of American wannabe drinkers. In New England this was especially true given its proximity to Canada, a country which – say what you want about it – never lost its mind enough to prohibit drinking. And so towns and cities in Canada became the T-Town of 1920s America. They would cross at the border, get drunk, and come back. Others used connecting mountain roads and lake passes to smuggle booze into the US. Divers in the early 2000s have found huge caches of booze in Vermont’s Lake Memphremagog that had been ditched nearly ninety years before. Lighthouses were used as distribution points. Boats and fishing vessels used fake compartments to bring alcohol to the New England’s harbors. Shopkeepers used baby bottles (nipples and all) to sell covert flasks of whiskey.
New England itself (has) had an age-old relationship with do-it-yourself booze. Since the Mayflower showed up and spooked local residents, New Englanders have been making booze from things they found nearby their homes. Apples. Pumpkins. Turnips. So, for the US government in 1920 to suddenly up and tell them to stop brewing beer and cider was nonsense.
One of the people who no doubt found it nonsense was a soon to be student at Dartmouth College named Theodore Geisel. Like many with German lineage, his family had long been in the brewing business. It was a respectable way to earn a living and contribute to the joy of the local community. The day his father was named head brewer at the local NAME brewery, prohibition as signed into law. At Dartmouth, Geisel drank socially with friends and it’s during one such activity that he was caught and reported to the president of the school.
The president of the school was Ernest Martin Hopkins, a reasonable and intelligent overseer who, though he agreed with the concept of clean living and abstinence, did not believe the government should be deciding those principals for the American people. And though he mostly employed a policy of laissez faire with student affairs, he was forced to take action. Young Mr. Geisel was expelled from student extracurriculars, one of which was writing and drawing cartoons for the school humor magazine the Jack O’Lantern. He found a loophole by employing various pseudonyms – L. Pasteur, L. Burbank, D. G. Rossetti, T. Seuss, Seuss, Dr. Theophrastus Seuss, and eventually settling on the one that would stick: Dr. Seuss.
But perhaps no college did it quite like Dartmouth. Dartmouth had a reputation for boozing. Nestled amongst the forests and mountains of New Hampshire, Dartmouth was something of a drunkard’s haven. In 10920, a student was arrested for murder, which had occurred over whiskey. Well, the previous year the same student was arrested and not charged for a similar murder, there’s an argument to be made that the school wasn’t so much a drinking place as much as this student was a psychopath.
Dr. Seuss wasn’t done with his alcohol adventures. He drew advertisements for Narragansett beer and for Shaefer beer’s bock beer. Since bock means goat in German, Seuss drew a goat which belongs on the walls of Whoville. His character of Chief Gassett (your bog standard cigar store Indian) would appear later and give us hints of the controversies that might have come for our favorite artist. Chief Gassett was probably stunned to find himself riding the Shaefer goat, but it’s clear that Seuss couldn’t stop himself from crossover fun even then. His Hankey bird for a small scotch whiskey distillery brought us even closer to the unique Seuss-style characters and even gives us some back story, which, though it doesn’t rhyme, still shows that creativity that many of us who weren’t in his WWII sights (ahem, the Japanese American community) would come to unconditionally love.
