The Phantom Friends of Spokane: A Temperance Warning
An editorial in The Spokane Press warns that friendships forged over liquor are hollow illusions, citing William Makepeace Thackeray to argue that alcohol destroys genuine human connection.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There are no social connections more hollow or business connections more profitless than those formed over the liquor bottle. The sentiments and feelings there engendered are not genuine. They are not grounded in your true nature. They do not touch your real heart strings.
The coarse jest that you laugh at so boisterously and regard as each rare wit, when drinking, seems shallow commonplace when you are sober.
The good fellowship that warms your mind when maudlin appears garish and empty enough the next morning.
This is the rule. There are exceptions. If these have come to be the best associations you know, it is because you have narrowed down your environments and opportunities and contracted your mind and heart and soul until there is room left in your life only for the worst that the world affords.
William Makepeace Thackeray was no teetotaler. But he wrote this of drink-inflamed intimacies:
"I think the intimacy which is begotten over the wine bottle is spirit of this nature (has no heart). I never knew a good feeling come of it or an honest friendship made by it; it only entices men and ruins them; it is only a phantom of friendship and feeling called up by the delirious blood and the wicked spells of the wine."
It is as true today as it was when written, more than 50 years ago. Drinking is the same sort of thing today that it was in 1842, when Thackeray thus moralized upon the life history of one of his own schoolmates, who followed gambling and drinking to his suicidal death, for he put a pistol to his head and blew out his brains when he was penniless and starving, deserted by his wine bottle intimates.
Much the same story is told every day in every newspaper in the world.
Such friendship is still the same phantom that flees when need comes, still the same guilty counterfeit of the true thing.
While modern discourse often focuses on the physiological harms of alcoholism, this 1903 editorial highlights a persistent social anxiety: the fear that substance use erodes authentic community bonds. The paper’s invocation of Thackeray suggests that even in an era of booming civic development and 'phantom friendships,' the struggle to maintain genuine human connection amidst industrialization and vice remained a central cultural concern.
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