These people were beginning to resent the changes that were occurring in America and to be ready to accept that drunkenness might be behind such phenomena as industrialization, the rise of megacities, and their population with hordes of Roman Catholic immigrants.”

The group relied heavily on propaganda. They used a combination of anti-immigrant rhetoric, racism, and whatever else might work to win voters.  For example,  they attempted to link alcohol use in people’s mind with the spread of venereal diseases such as gonorrhea and syphilis, which at that time were diseases that were incurable and prevalent.

The mood of the population at the time was ripe for change,  and the ASL whipped the voters into a frenzy.  Even the famous author Jack London, himself a notorious heavy drinker, wrote an anti-alcohol book that was based on his alcoholic memories.  In his book,  John Barleycorn,  he stated that the first time that he was intoxicated he was only five years old. He said that his father frequently took him to saloons as a child,  and it impressed him deeply and negatively. London said that by the age of 15 he was a heavy drinker. He eventually came to believe that only Prohibition would save others from the life of alcoholism that he had experienced.

The greatest success of the league was the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which it was instrumental in passing.  However,  it was unable to prevent the repeal of Prohibition and subsequently lost its power,  since it was essentially a one-issue organization and that one issue could not be re-won.

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 
No account of temperance would be complete without a description of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.  Formed in 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio, this organization dominated the information received by the public about alcohol, alcohol abuse, and alcoholism in the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th century. (The organization still exists today, although it is a mere shadow of its former self.)

The WCTU sought to punish public drunkenness with incarceration and did not buy into the idea that alcoholism was a disease. Instead, WCTU members saw it as a moral failing and believed the only true course against it was abstinence. To the WCTU, intemperance was a serious and direct assault on the home and the family. They believed in the view of the man as the breadwinner and were distressed at the thought that drinking males deprived their family of income as well as of their company. They actively attempted to redefine the male role from an image of swaggering and drinking males to the truly “masculine”  males who supported and paid attention to their families.
They wore white ribbons to identify themselves as WCTU members.

WCTU members were extremely diligent at bringing their message of sobriety to young people, working with Sunday schools at first,  and then public schools; for example, the organization created their Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and Art in 1883, whose mission was to promote their temperance views and censor the views of all those who opposed them. The WCTU, under Frances Willard and others,  eventually expanded their views to women’s suffrage,  realizing that there was much more power available to those who could vote.