“All Great Reforms Go Together”—Temperance and Abolitionism

This chapter begins with the starting point of conventional temperance narratives: Lyman Beecher’s Six Sermons on Intemperance (1826), and the American Temperance Society (ATS). Rather than being an admonishment against drinking, his sermons condemned the selling of drink, thus underscoring how the modern temperance movement always tilted against the profit motive of the liquor traffic rather than against booze itself. Understanding prohibitionism as a weapon of the weak, this chapter examines the overlooked role of black temperance at a time when abolitionism and temperance were virtually synonymous. In 1851 Maine rescinded all liquor-selling licenses, making it the first prohibition state: a move applauded by Frederick Douglass and black activists, who equated the bonds of addiction with the bonds of slavery. Even the great emancipator himself—the famously temperate Abraham Lincoln—was instrumental in passing Illinois’s “Maine Law” while a state legislator.

Temperance and Self-Determination in the British Isles

Part II of the book (Chapters 5–8) examines the British Empire, with Chapter 5 focusing on liquor and imperialism within the British Isles, where temperance movement first took hold in the periphery of Scotland and Ireland. The chapter explores the colonizer’s alcohol narrative in Ireland, used to justify the domination of Britain’s “first colony.” In the 1840s, Fr. Theobald Mathew’s wildly popular Irish temperance movement quickly fused with the cause of Irish nationalism, thanks to Daniel O’Connell. With the advent of “Maine Law” prohibitionism, everyone from John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx contributed to debates over alcohol control and prohibition. Intertwined with Irish Home Rule, British prohibitionism crested in 1895 and then gave way to Gothenburg alcohol control and pub reform, especially with World War I. Similar imperial dynamics of alco-colonization are noted in Britain’s other white settler colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Moral regulation as status politics: A critical reconstruction of Joseph R. Gusfield’s theory

Sociology of moral regulation has been interested in different kinds of morally charged social movements, such as the temperance movement, to investigate the social reasons why people take part in such movements. One answer is provided by Joseph Gusfield’s classic analysis of the American temperance movement, The Symbolic Crusade, published in 1963. The status politics theory developed therein provides a potential explanation of participation in moral regulation movements. This paper reconstructs the general logic of status politics explanations from an actor-centred perspective, explicating the actor image and the status anxiety mechanism inherent in the theory. Some of the problems discussed include third-person explanations and proof of status anxiety. With due caution, status politics theory provides one alternative for explaining mobilisation in moral regulation movements as well as populist politics.

On the Path to Forced Sobriety: The Church Spearheading the Temperance Movement

The relationship held with liquor varies from person to person; a dear friend to those habituated to drinking however, a foe to those that lost a husband, a mother, a daughter and a son to liquor addiction, be it through consumption orharm induced by another consumer(s). The case of the Mizo Christians presents a unique construct on the making of a good Christian thoroughly rooted by the British Missionaries. One necessary pre-condition to the making of a good Christian was abstention from their beloved zu implying the renunciation to the ‘thing’ that held a tread that connected them to their cultural past. Thus, making abstention the symbol of the indigenized Christian and the culture left behind. The passing of years had only increased the Church’s aversion to the drink. Government policy enforced in 1973 had caused for such varieties to be introduced in the state. Prior to the introduction of the Mizoram Excise Act, 1973, civil society had done much to curb the proliferation of country liquor. The Mizoram Presbyterian Church in particular had lobbied for ‘total prohibition’ since 1991 which resulted in the enforcement of their objective, leading the reluctant Government to implement ‘forced sobriety’ in the state.

Private Spirits, Public Lives: Sober Citizenship, Shame and Secret Drinking in Victorian Britain

This article considers Victorian concerns about the rise of secret drinking amongst respectable women. These new, apparently dangerous, practices were blamed on licensed grocers and even railway station refreshment rooms. Understandings of different male and female natures went hand in glove with anxieties about the potential effects of drinking. That alcohol might be consumed in secret, at home, triggered concerns about the shameful state of womanhood and the risks for the domestic space and state of the family. This secrecy, and an apparent absence of reliable evidence as to the scale of the problem, is central to the methodological challenge and argument in this article. Using their knowledge of and putative responsibilities for the private sphere, women in the temperance movement organized against the grocer. The article analyses published accounts of women’s work in the Church of England Temperance Society, the British Women’s Temperance Association, and Women’s Total Abstinence Union. It argues that their efforts, rooted in private and domestic imperatives, tested the social and spatial reach of women’s reform work. Acting against the grocer helped women to articulate a distinctively public model of sober citizenship.

"Slaves to rum" : alcohol, temperance, and race in America, 1800-1920

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black men and women heralded the cause of the temperance movement, the organized push to combat Americans' excessive drinking habits. This thesis centers on the origins of their advocacy in the context of debates over slavery, prejudice, and segregation in the United States. White Americans justified their racism by constructing images of Black 'degradation'. Implicit in this racist conception was the idea that Black Americans were unable to control themselves, including around alcohol. White people thus feared that Black alcohol consumption would breed crime and racial violence. Armed with this fantasy of criminality, white reformers set out to suppress Black Americans and maintain their social and political power. Black reformers contested these attempts from the origins of their temperance crusade in the 1820s until Prohibition a full century later. Men and women organized across the North and, after emancipation, the South in order to formulate a response to ideas of degradation and drunkenness. Namely, they refused to drink at all. Black Americans were among the most vociferous proponents of temperance, arguing that abstention from alcohol would eventually lead to their freedom and equality within the United States. By observing racial strife over the course of the long nineteenth century, this thesis ultimately demonstrates how understandings of alcohol provide a window into the history of racial injustice in America.