As we enter what feels like the 800th year of this American election season, I can’t help but find myself thinking back to the guys who started it all. We’ve spent a lot of energy and legislative manpower attempting to decipher and interpret the language the Founding Fathers used—and how they intended it to apply to technologies and concepts that didn’t exist in their era. And while there’s no denying that many of these men were ahead of their time in some ways, I question our tendency to put them on pedestals, be they literal marble ones or Tony Award–winning Broadway shows. Great thinkers they may have been, but they were also just people. What’s more, they may have been a little drunk. On September 14, 1787, just days before signing the Constitution, George Washington and his pals wracked up a bar tab at Philadelphia’s City Tavern worth the equivalent of $15,600 today. For 55 guests, the damage included 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 12 bottles of whiskey, seven large bowls of punch, eight bottles of cider, 22 bottles of porter, and 12 bottles of beer.
One can only speculate that this must have been a larger than usual celebration, especially since the bar bill includes a number of broken glasses. But the total still stands at two bottles of wine per person, plus beer, whiskey, and several glasses of punch—enough to knock most people today flat.
Brian Abrams, author of Party Like a President: True Tales of Inebriation, Lechery, and Mischief From the Oval Office, says it’s important to remember that consumption habits were generally different during the late 18th century. It was still common at the time to start the day with a small beer (usually around 3 percent ABV). “John Adams would drink a tanker of his cider every morning with his breakfast,” Abrams says. Part of that was a coping mechanism for the physical and mental hardships of a rather difficult period in history. “As far as why all these old guys were drinking all the time, people’s bodies were riddled with all sorts of incurable diseases,” Abrams says. “Everyone’s walking around with whooping cough or typhoid, or they have splinters with tetanus in them, or bullets lodged in their bodies. These were not things that doctors could cure, so people just drank.”