TEMPERANCE AND PROHIBITION

New Concerns

Temperance was a prominent issue in American reform movements throughout the nineteenth century, but it took on new urgency during the decade of the 1900s as part of the effort by the progressives to exert social control. Progressives blamed the "liquor trust" for promoting alcohol use and abuse and thus tied the growing crusade for Prohibition to the larger goal of curbing the influence of big business.

Saloons

There was some truth to the charges by temperance crusaders: in 1900 brewers controlled two-thirds of bars and saloons in the Midwest. These saloons were gathering places for the urban working class, where machine politicians could find their constituents and cajole them for their votes. Indeed, urban working-class voters were known as "wets" and strongly opposed any kind of Prohibition. Many first- or second-generation immigrants drank as part of their customary recreation, and they would not accept government interference in their personal lives.

Reformers

For reform-minded Protestant elites, the gathering of the "lower orders" in taverns and saloons was dangerous and corrupt, and when mixed with politics was yet another reason to prohibit alcohol sales. Reformers thus argued that consumption of alcohol was bad for the body and for the body politic. In pamphlets churned out by the thousands they decried the role of alcohol in domestic abuse, in the disintegration of families, and in the waste of hard-earned wages.

Problems in the Workplace

Employers increasingly joined the ranks of antialcohol crusaders, for the consequences of drunkenness in the workplace were more severe than ever before. A hungover worker was much more likely to be hurt in the new mechanized factory than would a nineteenth-century artisan who worked with hand tools. Henry Ford, Henry Clay Frick, and other industrialists insisted that their employees be teetotalers, as much out of the hope for increased productivity as out of a desire to protect their workers from injury.

New Tactics

The two best-known organizations promoting temperance and Prohibition were the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, and the American Anti-Saloon League (ASL), founded in 1895. The WCTU had initially focused on a campaign of persuasion, hoping to convince the individual drinker to give up liquor; the ASL focused on closing bars and saloons, and after 1910 also advocated prohibition of the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol.

The Role of Women

Women played a major role in the Prohibition campaign, and the brewers and distillers of alcohol in turn provided significant financial backing to opponents ofwomen's suffrage, fearing that if women gained the vote they would put them out of business. Activists such as Carry Nation used more confrontational methods than before, attacking saloons with bricks and hatchets. By 1907, when Oklahoma included Prohibition in its new state constitution, several states had gone dry. The tide was beginning to turn. The ASL proposed a constitutional amendment in 1914, and anti-German (that is, antibeer) sentiment during World War I helped set the stage for the Eighteenth Amendment's passage in 1919.

Sources:

Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978);

Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Age of the Titans: The Progressive Era and World War I (New York: New York University Press, 1988);

Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us From Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New York: Norton, 1976);

Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991).