Temperance

Temperance, the drive to restrict alcohol consumption, was the longest running social reform movement in the United States, beginning in the 1740s and culminating with the Eighteenth Amendment. From 1761 to 1812, Americans, for the first time, began to express concerns about alcohol consumption and to envision a world in which alcohol was not permitted.

The first stirring of temperance arose in the medical community in the 1740s. Physicians, particularly Philadelphian Benjamin Rush, noted a new disease then called the West Indies dry gripes, which caused a painful death in those who drank rum (later discovered to be lead poisoning from the West Indies lead stills). Rush’s experiences during the Revolutionary War (1775-83), when he worked for the Continental army, furthered his concerns regarding alcohol and led him to publish pamphlets detailing the dangers of hard liquor. For example, in Rush’s 1784 booklet, “Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body and Mind,” he asserted that spirits transformed a person into “in fetor, a skunk; in filthiness, a hog; in obesity, a he-goat.”

Rush’s recommendations went mostly unheeded until the early 19th century. By then an increasing consumption of whiskey and resulting drunkenness began to lead to anxiety about the moral rectitude of the newborn republic. When a doctor named William Clark read Rush’s pamphlet about the evils of drunkenness he showed it to his minister, who in turn shared it with influential members of their small New York town. These citizens banded together on April 30, 1808, to establish the first formal temperance group in the United States, the Union Temperance Society of Moreau and Northumberland. In 1813 Reverend Lyman Beecher also read Rush’s pamphlet and helped to found the Connecticut Society for the Reformation of Morals, a group focused on temperance. Other clergy soon founded similar organizations.

The success of ministers in establishing temperance groups is partly explained by the worry of the developing middle class about finding sober workers. Businessmen also feared that increased alcohol consumption would disrupt social relationships, particularly as employer-employee relationships changed during the early 19th century. Until this period, employees generally lived with their employers, and employers were responsible for the welfare of their workers. The new emphasis on family privacy and on the home as a refuge from the workplace in the early 19th century led employers to remove workers from their homes. Businessmen, especially in New England, may have felt guilty about leaving workers to fend for themselves and fearful of the workers over whom they exercised less and less control. When Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers began preaching about self-discipline and sobriety, the new business class, perhaps in order to relieve their guilt, agreed with this message enthusiastically.

Employers discovered that the ministers’ message released them from responsibility for their workers. Employers’ wives found the new message exciting because it gave them an important role in instilling self-discipline in the republic. Women founded organizations to curb prostitution, reform asylums and orphanages, help widows with young children, and reduce drinking. Women’s temperance efforts were more successful than their other social reform labors. Their exertions were aided by improvements in water sanitation, which made water safe to drink. However, the temperance movement remained in an embryonic stage before 1812 and tended to emphasize moderation rather than complete abstinence. Only in the 1830s and 1840s did the movement push for the complete abandonment of all consumption of alcohol and achieve national prominence.

See also marriage and eamily liee; religion; women’s rights and status.

Further reading: Nathan O. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revival in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

—Sarah Hand Meacham