Another view of the business of brew

THE DEVIL LET LOOSE IN MAINE, by Benjamin C. Bubar Sr., Noble Press, paperback, 1996, $9.95.

As a child in the early 1960s, I used to play with a girl named Krista who lived in an apartment house down the street from my home. Every so many weeks, as the two of us drove our pedal cars or played sidewalk games, Krista’s mom would warn from a window, “Old Man Thorne’s got his Bible and his gun. Watch out!”

Old Man Thorne lived in a red-brick house, always seemed to dress in sweaters, reeked of alcohol and tended to stand outside, talking to nobody in particular and often preaching with Bible in hand. His gun was more rumor than something actually seen, but the mere mention of it was enough to send us running.

I was too young at the time to appreciate the irony of sermonizing with weapon in hand, but this novel, written in the 1940s by an Aroostook County minister and temperance crusader, rekindled plenty of thoughts about the ways Americans approach the problem of religion and strong drink.

“The Devil Let Loose in Maine” is a melodramatic novel written by Benjamin Calvin Bubar Sr., the first chiropractor in Maine. He turned evangelist in the early part of the 20th century and, for a time, served as a song leader for evangelist Billy Sunday, who was as well known in the 1920s as Billy Graham is today. Bubar served in the Maine Legislature and, in 1936, ran unsuccessfully for governor. Demon rum increasingly became his Public Enemy No. 1.

Bubar is dead, but his family has pursued his crusade. One son, the late Benjamin Bubar Jr., was head of the Christian Civic League of Maine from the 1950s to the early 1980s, and ran for president twice as the candidate of the Prohibition Party. A daughter, Rachel Bubar Kelly, is national president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, based in Evanston, Ill.

Two of his children found the “Devil Let Loose” manuscript and added the novel’s final chapter.

It is a period piece, a temperance tract, designed to show the ruin of alcohol on everyone it touches — and the way Christian redemption can bring relief and forgiveness to all who are willing to abstain.

The devil was let loose in Maine, by the way, when “traitorous” state legislators retreated from the state’s famous Maine Law, all in the name of money, the novel says. That 1851 law, the first in the nation, banned the sale of liquor in the state, except for industrial or medicinal purposes.

Even before the 1850s had ended, the Legislature had weakened penalties, and prohibition became a seesaw political struggle in Maine for much of the next hundred years.

Bubar’s novel, which lacks a central character, reads a bit like an episode of the old television series “Dallas,” with a prominent Maine businessman unwilling to give up his liquor business and eager for a heavy-drinking colleague to marry one of his daughters. The daughter, of course, loves somebody else, and not until a revival service somewhere in the Maine countryside does the family see the light.

Bubar’s characters don’t have much subtlety. They tend to speak in simile. When one fellow runs into an old friend at a railroad station, he asks, “What are you doing here?” The old friend replies: “I just drifted in, like any other rudderless hulk which is driven by the wind and the storm.”

Even though the novel is set in the 1940s, its style is really pre-world war, even 19th century Protestant America, with its emphasis on female purity, the sanctity of the home, and strong women who are defenders of virtue. Bubar drives home how alcohol can wreck families.

He also unintentionally illustrates the link between female activism against alcohol and the slow movement toward women’s voting rights. At one point in the story, a key character tries to get his daughter to run for Maine governor, as the “dry” candidate. He backs off when she announces her engagement. Indeed, the “dry” component of Maine’s Republican Party tended to favor female suffrage.

The book won’t win any prizes for its writing or characterization. Instead, this novel and Bubar himself are a joint contribution to the history of Maine and the temperance movement. They illustrate a mind-set and cultural viewpoint that have played significant roles in the state’s life.