Gerald Hurowitz, M.D.·Published 19 April 2011·11 min read
Key points
The movement to ban alcohol and ostensibly, to save the family, was spearheaded by such temperance leaders as Woman's Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard, who led the organization from 1879 until she died in 1898.
Launched by six formerly hard-drinking men, the Washingtonians became a movement that attracted an astonishing 600,000 people who signed sobriety pledges.
The Independent Order of the Good Templars, otherwise known simply as the Good Templars, was an extremely large and powerful organization that operated in the mid- to late 19th century.
The Ohio Anti-Saloon League was created in 1893, according to K.
The movement to ban alcohol and ostensibly, to save the family, was spearheaded by such temperance leaders as Woman's Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard, who led the organization from 1879 until she died in 1898. Her motto was "Do Everything," and the WCTU led very active campaigns advocating for a wide variety of civic changes: public water fountains, girl's precision drill teams, and mandatory temperance education in public schools. However, they were strongly preceded in this movement by patriarchal organizations such as the Washingtonians and the Sons of Temperance. The Good Templars, in contrast, allowed female members. Of course, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was dominated by female members.
One of the earliest temperance movements, according to Stolberg, was the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, formed in 1813 by Lyman Beecher, a Protestant minister.
This was a group of clergy and leading community members who hoped to prevent the "lower social class" from drinking. This group disbanded in 1823, not succeeding in their mission.
The Washingtonians
Launched by six formerly hard-drinking men, the Washingtonians became a movement that attracted an astonishing 600,000 people who signed sobriety pledges. The organization also had sister organizations: Martha Washington groups for women. According to author William White, the Washingtonian movement all started with an argument at a tavern when the proprietor stated that temperance lecturers were all a bunch of hypocrites. Several of the men wondered if this was true, so they decided to attend a temperance lecture to discover for themselves if there was anything to it. Apparently they were considerably moved by the lecture because subsequently they and two of their fellow drinkers decided to form their own organization. They created their own pledge, which read: "We, whose names are annexed, desirous of forming a society for mutual benefit, and to guard against a pernicious practice which is injurious to our health, standing and families, do pledge ourselves as gentlemen that we will not drink any spirituous or malt liquor, wine, or cider." The members as well as the leaders of the Washingtonians were drawn from working class individuals, meeting weekly.
Author William White describes the weekly meetings of the Washingtonians in his book Slaying the Dragon, and his description of these meetings sounds remarkably like the format of today's Alcoholics Anonymous meetings: "Instead of the debates, formal speeches, and abstract principles that had been on the standard temperance meeting agenda, the main bill of fare at a Washingtonian meeting was experience sharing-confessions of alcoholic debauchery followed by glorious accounts of personal reformation. Following these opening presentations by established members, newly arrived alcoholics with bloated faces and trembling hands were offered the opportunity to join. As each newcomer came forward, he was asked to tell a little of his own story, then sign the abstinence pledge amid the cheers of onlookers.
Written and revised by
Gerald Hurowitz, M.D.
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This ritual of public confession and public signing of the pledge carried great emotional power for those participating. It evoked, at least temporarily, what would be described one hundred years later as ego deflation or surrender."
The Washingtonians organization ultimately spurred more than 600,000 people to sign pledges of sobriety, and thousands of their members marched in temperance parades. However, by 1845, the movement had lost most of its momentum. Some experts have theorized that conflicts with religious groups were responsible for the decline of the movement, while others said the organization had a weak internal structure or that other reasons were responsible for its demise.
Many former members of the Washingtonians joined the Sons of Temperance, another fraternal order that was founded in 1842 and grew to about 250,000 members.
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The Independent Order of the Good Templars
The Independent Order of the Good Templars, otherwise known simply as the Good Templars, was an extremely large and powerful organization that operated in the mid- to late 19th century. It was also an early impetus to the eventual passage of Prohibition. The Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT) was created in Oneida County in upstate New York in 1851, when several members of a discontented faction of another fraternal society, the Order of Good Templars, decided to break off and begin another organization.
Two lodges were launched in Utica, and eleven lodges were started within Oneida county, according to Peirce and Thompson, authors of the History of the Independent Order of Good Templars. These authors attributed much of the credit of the initial growth of the organization to Nathaniel Curtis, a reformed alcoholic from Ithaca, New York, who had taken the pledge of sobriety with the Washingtonians. It was also Curtis who decided that it was important for women to become members of the Good Templars.
In 1868, the Templars had more than a half million male and female members in the United States and Canada. By 1876, the IOGT boasted of having initiated more than 3 million members worldwide, with members in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Britain, and elsewhere. The name of the organization was changed to the International Order of the Good Templars, to acknowledge the many members in other countries.
A fraternal society in the 19th century, with many of the same accoutrements of other fraternal organizations, such as secret handshakes, rituals, and ranks, the Good Templars was uniquely different in several ways. First, it required its members to take a vow of sobriety, and it also supported the prohibition of the sale of alcohol. Second, it allowed females full membership, unheard of at that time, calling their male members "brothers" and their female members "sisters." During the Civil War, female members were credited with holding the organization together. However, some females complained that they did not have full equal status with men.
Despite this complaint, their role exceeded that of any other fraternal organization in the United States at that time. Other fraternal organizations let women join auxiliaries of the main membership, at best. Some female members who cut their teeth in leadership roles within the Good Templars later became members and leaders of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
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The Anti-Saloon League
The Ohio Anti-Saloon League was created in 1893, according to K. Austin Kerr, followed by the American Anti-Saloon League in 1895. A nonpartisan approach to achieving prohibition, the Anti-Saloon League was the brainchild of Reverend Howard Hyde Russell, a former attorney who decided to become a minister.
Russell believed that by supporting all candidates who were "dry," despite their political party, the organization could attain political power. At this time in history, the temperance movement was in disarray, and the Prohibition political party had little chance of gaining political power. Prohibitionists in the North and South continued to argue about civil rights for freed slaves in the South, and they could not unite on a single party platform.
Russell decided to attack the places that sold alcohol-the saloons-in a concerted attack to achieve his ultimate goal of the prohibition of alcohol.
Saloon owners greatly underestimated the power of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), and they failed to unite against it. In addition, powerful organizations such as the United Brewers' Association thought they had nothing to worry about because they made only beer, apparently not realizing that the Anti-Saloon League and other temperance groups wanted to ban all alcoholic beverages. When they finally realized that they had a serious political problem, saloon owners tried to be more vigilant about what occurred on their premises, no longer allowing gambling or prostitution and generally cleaning up their moral acts. But it was too late. The prohibition movement was steamrollering ahead by that point.
Said authors Lender and Martin, "The league proved that it could marshal votes for anyone-Republican or Democrat-who was willing to vote dry. Both the major parties rapidly awoke to the electoral power of the league, and it soon became apparent that the political fortunes of the antiliquor crusade would not have to depend on any single party-and certainly not on the small and ineffectual Prohibition party."
Wayne Wheeler led this effort for the AntiSaloon League, and "Wheelerism" became synonymous at that time with heavy and effective politicking. Wheeler actually drafted the implementing legislation which was known as the National Prohibition Act, but it was named after Andrew Volstead, a congressman from Minnesota.
The Volstead Act banned not only the use of distilled spirits, but also the use of wine and beer, and it also provided federal regulations overseeing the use of sacramental wine in the churches.
The Anti-Saloon League, the primary temperance organization in 1910, was more powerful and effective than the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. It obtained its funding from churches, and according to Iain Gately, author of Drink, the ASL received financial support from 60,000 congregations, which provided 2 million dollars per year, a significant amount of money at that time.
Gately said, "The donations it gathered from its supporters were spent on propaganda, and its publishing arm spewed out over 250 million pages of temperance writing each month. This blizzard of print was directed at white Protestant men and women in the old western and northeastern states.
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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.
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Carry Nation was a dramatic individual and a pivotal figure in the late 19th century temperance movement. She founded a county division of the WCTU in Kansas, and she closed down many illegal saloons. Then in 1899, she decided to go even further, because she said that God had ordered her to do so. The "hachetations" of Carry Nation (her own invented word) struck terror in the heart of many saloon keepers across the country. Nation entered saloons and used her hatchet to smash and destroy as much of a saloon as she possibly could before getting arrested and hauled off to jail. She was relentless.
Nation believed that alcohol itself was evil, and she was convinced that the banning of alcohol and the destruction of saloons that sold this substance were the only ways to save wives and children from suffering from unhappy lives. According to Gilbert Murdock, Nation died in 1911, apparently of congenital syphilis.
Immigrants and Their Impact on Temperance
During the early 20th century, the large influx of immigrants from Europe also influenced temperance movements. Some immigrants, particularly Germans, Italians, and Irish, were loath to give up alcohol, and they actively resented movements toward restrictions against or the prohibition of alcohol.
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Mark S. Gold, M.D. and Christine Adamec
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REFERENCES
Amethyst Initiative. Statement. Available online. Accessed March 1, 2009.
Beirness, Douglas J., and Erin E. Beasley. Alcohol and Drug Use Among Drivers: British Columbia Roadside Survey, 2008. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, 2009.
Berridge, Virginia, and Sarah Mars. "History of Addictions." Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health 58 (2003): 747–750.
Blanco, Carlos, M.D., et al. "Mental Health of College Students and Their Non-College-Attending Peers: Results from the National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions." Archives of General Psychiatry 65, no. 12 (2008): 1,429–1,437.
Blocker, Jack S., Jr. "Did Prohibition Really Work: Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation." American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 2 (2006): 233–243.
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