America,” and they even named a caramel candy after him—“Hobson’s Kisses.”  President McKinley personally decorated him for valor in the Cuban engagement where he was said to have single-handedly stopped the Spanish Fleet.  In fact his mission had been a total failure.  His assignment was to sail the aging USS Merrimac into the channel entrance at Santiago harbor and scuttle her there to trap the Spanish fleet—as Hobson himself put it: “Homeric manhood, erect and masterful on the perilous bridge of the Merrimac...”  Unfortunately the rudder jammed, the ship never made the channel, and Hobson had to be rescued by the Spaniards.  But it was a short war and there were hardly enough heroes to go around, so the navy promoted him to Captain and by 1906 the Hero of Santiago was a Congressman.

Now accustomed to the limelight, Hobson became uneasy when he felt it edging away.  So he reincarnated himself as a champion of the temperance cause and once again found himself at center stage.  He had a way with words.  He called liquor “the Great Destroyer,” and when he coined that term in a House debate, his admirers demanded that a copy of the speech be sent to every household in America.  But his most remarkable contribution was his quasi-medical analysis of the human brain. Hobson had no more medical training than the eminent Charles Towns, and he was equally undaunted.  The brain, he explained, is divided into various vertical layers like a building, with the baser instincts in the basement.  Alcohol attacks the penthouse—"the top of the brain ... organ of the will, of the consciousness of God, of the sense of right and wrong, of ideas of justice, duty, love, mercy, self-sacrifice and all that makes character."  Unfortunately, he said, Negroes and Indians were particularly susceptible to alcohol because their mental buildings were not as tall as the white man’s. According to Hobson, when alcohol reached the top of the brain of Negroes, "they degenerate ... to the level of the cannibal."^[33]

When his campaign was crowned with success in the enactment of Prohibition, Hobson needed a new focus for his unlimited moral indignation, and he retired from the scene for a few