Alcohol by Phillips Rod

Author:Phillips, Rod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2014-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

10: The Enemies of Alcohol 1830–1914

Temperance and Prohibition

For thousands of years, concerns had been expressed about the harmful effects of alcohol on human health and social order, but they were mere murmurs when compared with the furor of the attack on alcohol that rose during the nineteenth century. Temperance societies appeared in the 1830s, and fifty years later, mass organizations were dedicated to limiting the availability and reducing the consumption of alcoholic beverages or to eliminating them altogether. Powerful temperance and prohibitionist movements, many with religious affiliations, attracted widespread support in many parts of the world, notably in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. Working in national and subnational arenas and cooperating internationally, they publicized their messages in newspapers, pamphlets, and books and broadcast them in speeches and lectures. Many took to the streets to put pressure on governments to bring the alcohol business under control or to put it out of business altogether. To that time, it was the largest civilian mobilization of people and resources ever assembled to achieve a single policy goal, and it resulted in a wave of prohibition and near-prohibition policies in many countries during and soon after the First World War.

Historians have paid a lot of attention to these antialcohol organizations and their leaderships and, more generally, to the politics of alcohol in the nineteenth century.1 But far less attention has been given to the social, cultural, and material conditions that enabled the antialcohol movement to have such an impact on political culture and alcohol policies. These conditions included the broad changes that accompanied urbanization and industrialization in the 1800s, as well as more specific phenomena, such as the rise of Christian reform movements and gendered politics. At the material level, the availability and widening consumption of nonalcoholic beverages—especially potable water but also tea and coffee—had a critical impact on the cultural meaning of alcohol and made its consumption vulnerable to the attacks mounted by the organized antialcohol movements.

Although these organizations that emerged in the 1800s shared a general hostility toward alcohol, their broader strategies and immediate goals were often quite diverse. There were, first, important differences among those who called simply for moderation in drinking, those who called for voluntary abstinence by consumers, and those who wanted the total prohibition, by law, of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption. Some placed greatest weight on the health dangers of alcohol; others stressed the social disruption they believed it led to, while yet others drew attention to the dangers of alcohol for the growth and well-being of national populations, a powerful consideration in this period of intensified nationalism in Europe. Organizations with religious affiliations justified their positions by appeal to scripture, while others drew on secular and utilitarian arguments. Finally, women’s antialcohol organizations tended to focus on the dangers that drinking men posed to women, children, sexual morality, and the stability of the family.

Overall, the medium-term achievements of the antialcohol movement were impressive, but like the movements themselves, they varied from place to place.

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