Temperance Movement and US Control of Alcohol

[Name of the institute]Temperance Movement and US Control of Alcohol

he temperance movement, an unprecedented reform agitation, began in the nineteenth century and reached its climax in the early twentieth century. Its attack on the previously accepted consumption of alcoholic beverages ignited popular enthusiasm in the United States, other parts of the English-speaking world, and Scandinavia. Before the 1800s a few people abstained from alcoholic drink, but almost nobody tried to convert the general public to do likewise. Only excessive drinking had been considered a social and moral problem (Ronald, 2006).

In the United States the temperance movement seems to have been a product of a collision in the early 1800s involving the growing consumption of alcohol, mostly by men, that cheap whiskey encouraged and the growing sentiment in favor of moral reform. During the nineteenth century the Second Great Awakening optimistically aimed to reform the country on Christian principles through nondenominational voluntary societies. Temperance quickly became intertwined with evangelical Protestantism, the status of women, modernizing capitalism, and electoral politics. Temperance often meant the imposition of middle-class and middle-aged values on the poor, immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, and more generally young men (David, 2002).

In the early 1840s Washingtonianism, popular among the working and lower-middle classes, democratized the previously middle-class temperance movement. In contrast with earlier temperance societies, which scorned drunkards as beyond help, the Washingtonians featured testimony by repentant former drunkards to encourage pledges of total abstinence (Walters, 2008).

Prohibition made temperance controversial and political. It raised questions about personal freedom and property rights and whether coercive legislation regulating private behavior could be enforced without empowering government to an unacceptable degree. Moreover prohibition was divisive for the major political parties, which struggled to accommodate both the prohibitionists and their drinking, drink-selling, and drink-making enemies. After the war ...