Temperance Movement

The American Example

The temperance movement in the United States was the longest-lived and most radical of its kind. As transplanted from England in the first decades of the 19th century, American temperance focused narrowly on the use of distilled spirits and was at first neither a total abstinence movement nor inclined to use the power of the state to regulate manufacture or consumption. It was a movement by America's dominant Protestant elite to make drinking “ardent spirits” a disreputable practice, and by the 1830s it had taken hold in a notoriously hard-drinking society. At that point it became widely committed to complete abstinence from alcoholic beverages (“teetotalism”) and found growing numbers of adherents among aspiring workingmen and the masters of workshops and businesses. By the Civil War (1861–65), American drinking practices had become considerably more temperate and abstinence from alcohol—certainly from whiskey—was the norm among Protestant men and women of the middling classes. In particular, a powerful connection had been forged between abstinence and revealed religion, involving both white and African American people, especially women, though rarely in the same organizations. That association is reflected in the term Bible Belt, which refers to the concentration of fundamentalist Protestants across a large swath of the southern United States and the lower Midwest, areas still home to a disproportionate number of abstainers and strict local regulations concerning the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

The great drying of 19th-century America was imperiled by the liberal drinking habits of the Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, many of them Catholic, who flowed to the burgeoning cities of the United States after 1840, and by the rough and often besotted conditions of frontier life and migrant, seasonal trades like lumbering and fishing that employed tens of thousands of young men. Sensing that inevitable and unacceptable limits to moral suasion were embedded in the new demographic reality and unnerving industrial and urban conditions, temperance adherents moved haltingly but surely toward coercive measures. The first state law to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages passed in Maine in 1850, and for a generation, at least, prohibitionism was known as “Maine Law” temperance. By 1880, it was the dominant though not exclusive form of temperance activism.

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