A team of Journal Sentinel reporters spent a year examining the drinking culture in Wisconsin. The team evaluated studies, created and analyzed databases, surveyed Wisconsin residents, tested dozens of drinkers with a breath-testing device, reviewed more than 200 court files and conducted more than 200 interviews for this series.
Interactive Graphic: Drunken driving touches every corner of Wisconsin. More than 1,600 people died from Jan. 1, 2003, to Dec. 31, 2007, in alcohol-related accidents. The Journal Sentinel profiled one of those victims in every county across the state.
Check for ongoing, regular updates on the Wasted in Wisconsin blog.
First of five parts
Beer for beer and shot for shot, when all 50 states belly up to the bar, few can hold their own with Wisconsin.
Binge drinking - we're No. 1.
Percentage of drinkers in the population - No. 1.
Driving under the influence - No. 1.
We lag a few states in beer consumption, but we're near the top. With brandy, it's no contest. We put away more brandy per person than any other state. We have a strong claim on the vodka title, too.
And often we have no clue how drunk we are. Consider, for example, 75 drinkers who took a breath test for the Journal Sentinel. About half underestimated their blood-alcohol level, and when they did, they missed by a lot - falling short of their actual results by an average of 35%. Many who were over the legal limit for driving expressed full confidence in their ability to get behind the wheel.
Person for person, we have three times more taverns here than the rest of the country - from Whiskey Dick's in Bruce to Musky Jack's east of Fifield; Tara's Squirrel Cage in Kellnersville to Beaver's Hut in Freedom; The Dump in Cambria to The Morgue in the hamlet of Slab City. And we spend twice as much money inside them.
AT&T's online telephone directory lists more bars in Appleton, population 70,000, than in Fort Worth, Texas; Memphis, Tenn.; or Sacramento, Calif.
Wisconsin's abundant taverns are the setting for camaraderie and celebration, but at a cost: Drinking in bars is strongly associated with drunken driving, research has shown.
Study the data, read history or talk to tavern-goers. The message comes through clearly: Drinking isn't just something we do to pass time at the ballpark or Summerfest or a Halloween party. It is, for better and worse, an element that helps define Wisconsin as Wisconsin, part of our identity.
"It's who we are," said Chris Geldon, a 27-year-old supermarket manager from South Milwaukee, as he kicked off St. Patrick's Day at a Water St. bar. "It's almost like there's a drinking expectation, that we embrace it, that we can have a good time and it's part of our culture."
"I'm not saying it's anything to be proud of, but you've got to be good at something," added fellow St.-Patty's-Day-morning celebrant Bobby Maurer as he perched at the end of the bar at Jim Hegarty's Pub on W. Wells St. "I guess it's what we're good at."
***
The reasons for that skill are open to debate.
But here - based on interviews with sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and historians, and conversations with more than 100 state residents and visitors - is a thumbnail sketch of several elements in Wisconsin's warm embrace of alcohol:
Climate. Ethnicity. The historical importance of the brewing industry. The interpersonal dynamics that govern how people learn to live comfortably in a group. The social nature of most drinking. A relative lack of newcomers who might foster change. The premium many here place on being just a regular person. The need for identity.
Almost 80 years ago, with Prohibition in full swing, a U.S. Treasury agent kept tabs on Wisconsin. He noted numerous saloons in Sheboygan, wildcat breweries in Oshkosh, "general lawlessness" in Hurley and 1,217 liquor-selling "soft-drink parlors" in Milwaukee. He offered this assessment:
"Liquor," he wrote, "has always been plentiful in Wisconsin."
Among the results of that abundance:
Wisconsin leads the nation in the percentage of people who admit to driving under the influence of alcohol. In only a few states are drivers involved in fatal accidents more likely to be drunk. In 2007 alone, Wisconsin's drunken-driving excess claimed more than 70 lives beyond the national norm.
The federal government estimates that alcohol claims some 1,250 Wisconsin lives a year - about 2.7% of all deaths statewide. That's nearly twice the number that die from prostate cancer. Drinking is blamed for scores of deaths from suicides and homicides, and hundreds from falls, strokes and liver disease.
Nonetheless, we're sensitive enough to the feelings of beverage interests that our laws avoid the conventional terms alcoholic beverages or alcoholic liquors used in the statutes of the great majority of states. In the awkward language of Wisconsin law, they're alcohol beverages.
But there's another side to the data on drinking in Wisconsin, one that makes the overall picture more nuanced and less bleak.
We down more alcohol per person than almost any state not because we drink so much, but because so many of us drink. With relatively few Wisconsinites abstaining, our consumption per drinker is lower than about half the states.
As an example, consider Wisconsin and Tennessee. Wisconsin has the country's highest percentage of drinkers. Tennessee's percentage is among the lowest.
Not surprisingly, Wisconsin consumes significantly more alcohol, even with a smaller population. But the average drinker in Tennessee significantly out-drinks his Wisconsin counterpart.
The bottom line: Drinkers in Wisconsin, on average, are more moderate than those in many states.
Doubters can check the data on the cause of death most tightly linked with chronic and excessive drinking: alcoholic liver disease. Wisconsin's mortality rate has been below the national average for many years. In 2005, the state's death rate from chronic liver disease and cirrhosis ranked 31st.
Nor, for all the drinking done here, is Wisconsin's rate of all deaths attributable to alcohol anywhere near the top among the 50 states. It's right in the middle - 25th.
But while the typical Wisconsin drinker may be more moderate in annual consumption than his counterparts in many other states, he's also significantly more prone to occasionally binge, and that can spawn a host of problems.
***
Miller Park on opening day is the All-Star Game of alcohol. If Wisconsin excels in binge drinking, this is a collective bender. April's edition was no exception.
At one gathering, a 32-year-old mother proudly performed a 14-second keg stand - which, for the uninitiated, involves swallowing as much beer as you can while upside down.
Another group - including people in their 30s and at least one in his 60s - enthusiastically drank from an Octabong, a funnel-and-tube device that quickly and simultaneously fills eight people with the equivalent of a can of beer each.
Beer bongs often are associated with college drinking, but on opening day in Milwaukee, they command broader appeal.
"You have a huge number of professionals at this tailgate party," said one of the crew, 31-year-old attorney Emily Davey. "You have more than one lawyer. You have a doctor. You've got a couple of real estate agents. I think there's one teacher … No he's a real estate appraiser. We have a banker, an insurance agent, an insurance underwriter and the rest of them I don't have a clue."
One of them was Boston-area resident Don Bean, 38. The owner of a manufacturing business in Racine, Bean is New England born and bred. Until last year when he made his first visit, he had never seen anything like opening day at Miller Park.
"That's why I'm here again," he said. "This is just a great atmosphere. It's like nothing in the Northeast."
And it's not just Miller Park. Bean raved about the festivities surrounding the Green Bay Packers and Wisconsin Badgers, too. Last year he went to his first Badgers game in Madison - sort of. He never made it inside Camp Randall Stadium.
"I was having too much fun," he said.
He said his father would be mortified to see him with a beer bong, but for Bean, a bash like opening day is time out from ordinary life and its duties. That's a key reason people drink, according to anthropologists, and in Bean's view, Wisconsin is an ideal place to indulge.
Boston, he said, is "much more uptight," and Maine, where he grew up, is "a puritanical state" where you'd never see adults partying as they do in Milwaukee.
Here, he said, "it's almost like a religion."
***
And binge drinking - at least as the federal government defines it - is a cornerstone of the creed. No state observes the ritual more faithfully than Wisconsin. It's not even close.
Since 1995, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has conducted 10 surveys about binge drinking. Every time, Wisconsin led the nation. The state typically out-binged its nearest challenger, usually North Dakota, by more than 13%. It typically out-binged the country as a whole by more than 50%.
The surveys say nearly one in four Wisconsin adults had binged in the previous month, and surveys on drinking often understate the actual numbers.
To Wisconsinites, binging is no big problem. People here are less likely than the residents of almost any state to view such drinking as risky. And truth be told, the government's threshold for binging is low enough - five drinks for a man or four for a woman over an unspecified period - that a binge drinker could remain well within the legal limit for driving.
Critics such as David J. Hanson, a professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at Potsdam, say the official definition dramatically exaggerates the extent of actual binging - commonly understood to mean unrestrained, prolonged drunkenness.
Others, though, see value in the definition. The number of people downing five or more drinks per occasion is a key indicator of alcohol-related problems such as drunken driving, said William C. Kerr, a senior scientist at the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, Calif.
And Wisconsin drivers involved in fatal crashes are significantly more likely to be drunk than are drivers across the country.
To keep things in perspective, the problem has eased over the last three decades both here and nationwide - because of a host of reasons, including relatively fewer young adults.
But Wisconsin lags the national trend.
Across the country, drunken-driving deaths are down about one-third from the early 1980s. In Wisconsin, they're down 20%.
Had Wisconsin merely kept pace with the U.S. pattern, nearly 250 lives would have been saved over the last five years.
***
The Miller Park bacchanal starts early, and by 10:30 a.m., Chris Polansky, a 27-year-old television/video production student, had plenty of company as he hunched over a small grill cooking scrambled eggs and sausage. He'd set up near the edge of the Dodgers lot east of the stadium, and from his asphalt camp to the end of the aisle a quick survey found 108 adults relaxing, chatting, listening to music and playing games. Seventy-six of them had a beer in hand.
Polansky did too - a 40-ounce Miller High Life.
"My dad drank beer, my uncle drank beer. It just kind of gets passed down, I guess," he said as he tended his breakfast. He estimated that over the course of a long day before, during and after the baseball game, he would down the equivalent of 10 to 12 regular-size beers.
Did he know that the CDC officially considers five drinks per occasion to be a binge?
"That's probably true in 49 other states," Polansky said, "but here we have a little bit higher tolerance."
***
Conventional wisdom points to Wisconsin's German-ness, its breweries and its interminable winters as the foundation of the state's drinking culture. All three factors make sense. Wisconsin once was a brewing capital, it shares a strong if distant bond with stein-hoisting Germany, and a glance at a map of the heaviest-drinking states shows them clustered in the country's northern tier.
But the German/brewing connections, while cited by many, are at least open to question.
Some 43% of Wisconsinites claim ancestry from Germany - second only to North Dakota, a state that virtually mirrors our drinking patterns. But time has diluted Wisconsin's German blood. The great majority of German immigration to the state ended more than 100 years ago. And while North Dakota downs a lot of alcohol, so does much of New England, where German ancestry is minimal.
"I don't buy it," Wisconsin historian Jack Holzhueter said of the German-heritage explanation. "Too many generations have gone by."
Similarly, brewing was Milwaukee's leading industry in 1890. It wasn't long, though, before it was eclipsed by manufacturing and began declining in economic importance.
But even if the direct effects of Wisconsin's German and brewing heritage have largely vanished, they help shape the state's collective identity - an identity many accept as it's passed on to them.
The influence of Germans and other immigrant groups, along with Wisconsin's relatively large Catholic population, helped hold the anti-drinking movement in check in the early part of the 20th century, said folklorist James P. Leary, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"I think in many ways in Wisconsin we have kind of a reconfiguration of European peasant cultures," Leary said. "These people worked hard and played hard and liked to have a beer."
They also fostered what Leary sees today as a sort of statewide loyalty to beer - almost a feeling that if you're from Wisconsin you should drink it.
James Rhem, a Madison photographer and arts critic who has written on alcohol in Wisconsin, made a similar point.
"People think of drinking here as somewhat like supporting the home team," he said.
Indeed, one theme emerging from interviews with partiers at events such as opening day was pride in being a hard-drinking Wisconsinite.
"I go to (UW) Madison, and we get people from out of state; they don't know how to drink at all," Chelsea Krueger, 21, of Suamico said while tailgating at a Packers playoff game in January.
"A lot of people just pride themselves on thinking, OK, we're from Wisconsin, we've got to (uphold) that reputation," said Shane Lamb, a 19-year-old Madison Area Technical College student drinking in a driveway at the Mifflin Street Block Party in May.
None of this would surprise anthropologists who study the role of alcohol in society, typically analyzing it from a cultural perspective rather than as a source of problems.
"In many societies, perhaps the majority," Binghamton University anthropology professor Thomas M. Wilson wrote in a 2005 book, "drinking alcohol is a key practice in the expression of identity, an element in the construction and dissemination of national and other cultures."
Not only that, but the image itself - handed across generations and expressed in legendary tales of prodigious drinking - helps shape the reality.
"The self-fulfilling effects of expectations, preconceptions and stereotypes of others are well documented in social psychology," said Jason A. Nier, a professor of that subject at Connecticut College.
Or, as Geldon put it on St. Patrick's Day, "It's kind of imprinted in us … It was almost like when I was 21 I had to join the culture."
***
Helping perpetuate that culture is a relative lack of new blood.
Outsiders, with their potentially different attitudes and habits, don't exactly flock to Wisconsin. Nearly three in four state residents were born here - the ninth-highest percentage in the U.S. Nationwide, 60% of Americans live in their native state. When it comes to drinking, the habits of friends and neighbors are critical. Drinking, for the most part, is social behavior. We do it with other people. And if our friends drink, we're more likely to drink.
"People are strongly influenced by local norms, that is, by what they see others doing - especially their peers, members of the groups they belong to and identify with," said Lawrence University psychology professor Peter S. Glick.
We're hard-wired for this. Deep in our evolutionary history, humans learned to depend on each other to survive. Exile from the group, Glick said, was a death sentence.
"Consequently," he said, "we evolved to be exquisitely attuned to getting along with the group, giving us the tendency to conform - whether for good or for ill. So when there is an established heavy-drinking norm, it will tend to perpetuate because there is lots of social tolerance and reward for drinking."
Drinking also fits comfortably with what some see as a just-regular-folks, anti-elitist strain in Wisconsin's character. You know, the kind of people who would take an insult from Illinoisans - "cheesehead" - and turn it into a symbol of pride. Holzhueter once described this as Wisconsin's "Aw shucks" tendency.
Part of the anti-elitist attitude, he said, is a sense that we exemplify a true folk culture, and that "real people do these real things like getting drunk."
***
In January, as the Packers routed the Seattle Seahawks on the snow-blanketed, sacred turf at Lambeau, Frank and Dee Ellefson celebrated with everyone else who jammed McGuire's Sports Bar & Restaurant.
McGuire's is in Lena, a small village in Oconto County with what is, even for Wisconsin, exceptional tavern density. The state as a whole has roughly one tavern or alcohol-serving restaurant for every 430 people. And Lena? One for about every 85 citizens.
At McGuire's, the Ellefsons, who had stopped in on the way to their cabin near Crivitz, were drinking - Bud Light for Frank, Captain Morgan with Diet Coke for Dee - and talking about drinking.
Take Minneapolis and St. Paul, said Frank, a 41-year-old sales manager whose territory includes the Twin Cities. There, in his opinion, people choose what to drink and where to drink to try to impress each other. It's a prestige thing, he said, but that's not how it is in Wisconsin.
Dee agreed. Wisconsinites do drink heavily, the 38-year-old nurse said, but they do it to have a good time, break down barriers and connect with friends. Drinking helps with that, she said.
It was happening at McGuire's. The Packers were winning, people were laughing and the beer was flowing. The owners laid out a spread of food. A sign reminded patrons that on their birthday they could come back and "Drink free all day!"
Two hundred-some years ago the great English writer Samuel Johnson, who had opinions on just about everything, said nothing man had invented produced as much happiness as a good tavern. McGuire's, on this winter evening, was doing its share.
Dee was a full participant, both contributing to and enjoying the atmosphere. To her, the crowded bar wasn't a roomful of potential trouble but an example of something essentially good about her state.
"I just think Wisconsin is real people," she said.
All around her, the room was filled with laughter, shared stories, jokes. But the reality was that eventually the stories and jokes would end for the evening, just as they do every night in every bar and at every house party, every ball game, every picnic.
Then the drinkers head home or wherever else they're bound, and sometimes that doesn't produce any happiness at all.
Ben Poston of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
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