The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 10 (1999)

The Changing Meaning of What Was Considered
to Be “Taboo” in the History of theTemperance Movement
Masaru OKAMOTOINTRODUCTION
Originally, the term “taboo” referred to words, objects, and acts whichshould be avoided because they were religiously impure or holy. At present, however, the term is used freely in daily as well as religious life andwhat it might refer to has undergone change. Whatever had once beentaboo might not be now, whereas whatever had once not been taboo
might be now. The advocacy of birth control in the early 20th century
and smoking in front of non-smokers are respective examples.
Looking into the history of temperance1 advocacy in America fromthe colonial period to national prohibition in the 1920s, we realize that
excessive drinking had always been taboo. Until the middle of the 20th
century, even medical associations had not ofﬁcially admitted that alcoholism was a disease. Many doctors as well as ordinary citizens had
thought that only immoral persons might break this taboo.
Excessive drinking was not the only taboo. Temperance reformers
from the middle of the 19th century onward came to view saloons asvenues for breaking taboos because they were linked to gambling, prostitution, and political corruption. What was considered to be taboo intemperance advocacy, consequently, changed and had wider implicaCopyright © 1999 Masaru Okamoto. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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tions. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these changes while focusing on the social background of this transformation.
I

COLONIAL DRINKING PRACTICES IN NEW ENGLAND

From the beginning of English colonization both in the South and in
New England, moderate use of alcoholic beverages had been permitted
as an indispensable part of daily life, but excessive drinking was regarded as taboo. This was especially the case in the New England colonies,
where religious leaders played an important role to build a prosperous
society. Leaders in American colonization entertained misgivings about
drunkenness because they had already experienced it in Britain. John
Winthrop, the ﬁrst governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, warned
his fellow settlers against immoderate drinking before they landed at
Salem in 1630, and he refused to drink ardent spirits at his dinner table.2
In the colonial period, liquor was a daily necessity for women and children as well as for men, as we can see from Increase Mather’s famous
description of it, “a good creature of God.” Liquor was used as a substitute for such daily necessaries as coffee, milk, or even unhygienic water,
not as a luxury. At 11 o’clock in the morning and 4 o’clock in the afternoon, farmhands and apprentices were provided with a “rum ration,”while customers were also served free drinks at local shops. By 1790,
the beginning of the Republic, annual per capita consumption of liquor
was 5.8 gallons, high but still 18.3 percent less than the 7.1 gallons consumed in 1810 and in 1830, the highest level in American history.3
Throughout the colonial period, it was the consumer who was faulted
for drinking excessively, not the manufacturer or seller of liquors. An
example might be found in the words of Mather who, in 1673, called
upon the Massachusetts Bay colony “to discourage tippling and to banish the habitual drunkard.” 4 His son Cotton also warned that “Men havetheir Estates devoured, their Names devoured, their Hours devoured, andtheir very Souls devoured, when they are so besotted. . . . when [a drinker]
comes to Die, he’ll cry out as many have done, Ale-Houses are HellHouses! Ale-Houses are Hell-Houses!” 5 Although there were not organized efforts or a movement to combat the abuse of drinking at the time,
the churches in New England played a central role in preventing excessive drinking, especially at taverns on the Sabbath.
According to the Congregational Church records in Plymouth, if a person abused liquor, the “sinner” was summoned to appear in church to“TABOO ” IN THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

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repent in writing, and a repeat offender was to be admonished publicly.6
Colonial governments also imposed penalties on such a “criminal.” For
that purpose the governments ﬁrst had to deﬁne excessive drinking intheir statutes. In the Massachusetts Bay colony, for example, it wasdeﬁned in 1645 as drinking more than half a pint of wine in less than 30
minutes. At the same time, the neighboring Plymouth colony deﬁned adrunkard as someone who “either lisps or falters in his speech by reasonof much drink, or that staggers in his going, or that vomits by reason ofexcessive drinking, or cannot follow his calling.” 7
The governments also had to determine penalties for such offenses.
According to a law of 1679 in the New Hampshire colony, a convicted
offender had to pay ﬁve shillings for the ﬁrst offense, ten shillings forthe second, and to be put in the stocks for the third. In Massachusetts,
the amount of the ﬁne was higher: ten shillings for the ﬁrst offense andtwenty shillings for the second. In Plymouth and Connecticut, drunkards
who repeated excessive drinking publicly could not buy liquor from anyone because the sale of liquor to common drunkards was illegal and theirnames were made public. Moreover, they were forced to wear a sign withthe letter D (drunkard) on it.8
As mentioned above, throughout the colonial period, moderate drinking was permitted by everyone as a necessary part of daily life. Drinking
on the Lord’s day and public drunkenness, however, were banned by law
with various kinds of penalties. The main purpose behind the efforts toavoid immoral drinking was to build a prosperous colonial society underdivine protection. The colonists feared that disorder caused by excessive
drinking would lead to the failure of colonization. In this sense, weshould not overlook the point that advocating moderate drinking wasundertaken not for personal, but for social, reform.
Although the War for Independence brought independence to thirteenof Britain’s American colonies, it also contributed to an increase in
the amount of liquor consumed by soldiers. When General George
Washington was forced to endure the winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge,
Pennsylvania, he had difﬁculty procuring enough liquor and was anxious about the resulting low morale of his soldiers.
Among the people who joined the army, some military doctors suchas Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania and David Ramsay of South Carolina
differed from rest in their attitudes toward drinking. Nationally celebrated as one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Rush
became one of the earliest temperance advocates in America. As early

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as 1778, he wrote and distributed to soldiers the pamphlet “Directions
for Preserving the Health of Soldiers,” in which he urged them to drink
distilled liquors moderately.
Later, Rush became more radical. When he wrote his best known pamphlet, “An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors on the Human
Body and Mind,” in 1784, he advocated total abstinence from ardent spirits because they adversely affected both the body and the mind, causing
diseases which inhibited memory and understanding. Rush ﬂatly denied
the contemporary idea that “ardent spirits relieved fatigue, sustained hardlabour and protected one against heat and cold.” 9 Instead, he recommended the use of such fermented drinks as beer and wine.
Rush called for a total change in common attitudes toward drinking.
Until his time, most people had thought that the primary factor behindexcessive drinking was the weak will power of drinkers themselves. In
the colonial period, they had to repent and suffer punishments imposedby both churches and governments. On the other hand, liquors themselves, distilled as well as fermented, were “good creatures of God,” but
Rush tried to distinguish between fermented and distilled liquors andstrongly disapproved of the latter. His views helped to initiate the term
“demon rum.” In the late 18th century, however, Rush’s advocacy of
total abstinence from ardent spirits was too radical because ordinary citizens thought it acceptable to drink them moderately.
II INTEMPERANCE AS INDIVIDUAL TABOO
The ﬁrst English settlers wanted to transplant their drinking habits to
America. Their ﬁrst choice was beer, which was usually made with a
top-fermenting yeast, called porter or ale. It was relatively highly alcoholic and strongly ﬂavored. Beer was so bulky and perishable to shipfrom Britain that the colonists soon tried to brew it in America. It is interesting to point out that the ﬁrst project of Harvard College was to build
a brewhouse in 1637.10 Realizing that brewing what they had drunk in
England was almost impossible for one reason or another, the colonists
soon gave up their favorite. Instead, they began to make so-called smallbeer, about one percent in alcoholic content, by soaking barley in water.
Making small beer became a routine, weekly chore for colonial housewives.
Wine was another drink which the early settlers tried unsuccessfully
to make. From the beginning of colonization to the middle of the 19th

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century, most wines were imported and taxed so that only the wealthy
could afford them. The wines imported from Madeira and the CanaryIslands were especially expensive and became status symbols. On thecontrary, gin was regarded as drink for the poor as it was in Britain.
The most popular drinks during the colonial period were apple cider
and rum. Apple trees were transplanted to the northern part of thecolonies by the early settlers, and apple cider could be produced cheaply and in bulk by a simple process of fermentation. In the South, whereapples were not easily grown, colonists had another fruit drink known
as “peachy.” Also popular at the time was rum, which was imported fromthe West Indies at the end of the 17th century. In the early 18th century,
distilling rum became an important industry when molasses began to beimported to New England. Rum even became more than a drink ascolonists used it as money when bartering for furs and lands with Native
Americans and for Negro slaves with slave traders. Tens of distilleries
were built in Boston and Newport, and the case of the Browns ofProvidence making a fortune by distilling rum and then engaging in theslave trade is well known.
When the American colonists went to war for independence fromBritain, the situation regarding drinking changed rapidly. The Royal
Navy dominated the Caribbean Sea and stopped the trade in molasses sothat Americans had to distill their own alcoholic drink from domestic
grains. From just before the War for Independence to early in the 19th
century, the colonists from Scotland and Northern Ireland who settled
in and around the Appalachian Mountains were highly skilled in distilling. Moreover, at the end of the 18th century, such grains as barley, rye,and corn were harvested in bulk in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, andKentucky, so farmers there began to make whiskey from the surpluses
before they went bad. As a result, a large quantity of whiskey, referred
to as “liquid assets,” was marketed and fetched a low price of 25 centsa gallon. Because a farmhand could earn almost one dollar a day at the
beginning of the 19th century, whiskey was so cheap that he could buy
plenty of it.11 Under such a condition, coupled with the popular unacceptability of even moderate drinking, it was inevitable that America
would face severe problems concerning the consumption of liquor.
The most frequently cited statistics for liquor consumption in recent
books and papers on the temperance movement are those provided by
W. J. Rorabaugh. He estimated that the annual per capita consumptionof absolute alcohol at age 15 or over in 1790 was 5.8 gallons, which was

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nearly three times as much as in the late 20th century. In the early 19th
century, the amount rose sharply, culminating in 1810 and 1830 at 7.1
gallons. It was the highest quantity in American history and close to thephysiological limit for an average human body.12 This ﬁgure was theaverage amount consumed by all people in America who were 15 orolder, including those who did not drink, so those who did drink liquor
at that time consumed much more than 7.1 gallons of absolute alcohol
annually. When the temperance movement began its activities in the ﬁrst
quarter of the 19th century, there were three chronic alcoholics in every
ten drinkers, whereas the ﬁgure was only three in every two hundred
drinkers in the middle of the 20th century.13
Why did “the destruction of the republic” through alcohol almost takeplace early in the 19th century?14 In addition to the issues mentioned
above, including the fact that a huge volume of cheap liquors appeared
widely on the market, we should not overlook social changes. Westward
expansion to conquer the frontier had some inﬂuence on drinking. Unlike
the relatively settled and stable society in the East, frontier society in theWest was an unstable struggle for existence without any guarantees forlife and property. The majority of early frontier settlers were therefore
male, and they frequented saloons to ease their tension and anxiety.15
Soldiers were also big consumers as “three quarts of whisky daily was
not uncommon among soldiers along the frontier, ‘one quart . . . being
required [just] to set them up before breakfast.’” 16
Social changes caused by the Industrial Revolution in America
also inﬂuenced drinking behavior. Before the Industrial Revolution,
American society had been primarily agricultural with a few notablecommercial centers such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, andCharleston. Many farms were self-sufﬁcient, and the tobacco and cotton
plantations in the South produced surpluses for trade. In agrarian society, where people worked and lived at the same place, the amount of
alcohol consumed was relatively low, although it was drunk several
times a day with and between meals. This was known as “dram drinking” and was done mainly (in more than 80 percent of the cases) at
home.17 At workshops and on farms a rum ration of liquors was served
to apprentices and farmhands when they rested from work twice a day,a custom which took deep root in American society. In such a society,people were not inclined to have a sense of duty and hour and were not
likely to suffer from stress caused by competition or unease. Conditions
such as these in preindustrial America fostered tolerance of drinking.

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With the beginning of industrialization in America, starting in New
England after the War of 1812, people were required to change theirdrinking behavior. Husbands began to work away from home, which
wives converted into a female sphere of inﬂuence. Women and children
came to drink mainly non-alcoholic beverages such as coffee, milk, andwater because they became available more cheaply and safely.18 As aresult, drinking alcohol became mainly a male activity. Men drank as if
drinking were a symbol of “freedom and self-determination,” the ethosof the early 19th century.19 Since wives increasingly depended on theincomes of their husbands and suffered from their violence, wives cameto regard excessive drinking as taboo, and many women joined the temperance movement, easily agreeing to sign teetotal pledges.
The division of American society into male and female spheres ofinﬂuence caused changes not only from family drinking to drinking outside the home, but also from drinking with meals to drinking for its own
sake. It was after the 1820s that so-called “binge” drinking with friends
became popular among men.20 All people on the binge were required toget drunk, an example of the contemporary trend toward male egalitarianism since “all men were equal before the bottle.” 21 The emerging
problem of excessive drinking had much to do with these changes indrinking behavior as well as with the tremendous amount of liquor thatwas consumed.
In the early 1810s, when the annual per capita consumption of absolute
alcohol at age 15 or over reached the historically highest point, temperance societies began to be organized in such northern states as
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. The prime movers of thisearly movement were Puritan clergymen and Federalist politicians, bothfrom local elites. Most of them tried to address the problem of this highper capita consumption and regarded excessive drinking of cheap
whiskey by minors as socially disruptive, but they never referred to theirown consumption of expensive imported wines. Because the majority ofAmericans at that time felt that the clergymen and politicians were hypocritical, given that they too drank a lot, the early temperance movement
led by social elites was soon frustrated.
When the American Temperance Society (ATS) was organized in
Boston in 1826, the popular temperance movement began. While there
were still many Presbyterian and Congregational clergymen as its leaders, the number of politicians was much lower than it had been in the1810s, and rising industrial capitalists began to occupy positions of lead-

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ership. The new movement did its best to seek a broad-based membership by asking recruits to sign a “short pledge” to abstain from only distilled liquors and to pay a small initiation fee. The leaders were also
required to do the same so that they could be seen as equals of the general membership. The activities of the ATS included using “moral suasion” that involved distributing temperance propaganda in written form,
asking people to sign a temperance pledge, and holding temperance
meetings for preachers and laymen.
The ATS advocated abstinence, not moderate drinking, of distilled
liquors because the situation in the 1820s was so appalling that moderation seemed to be insufﬁcient. In this context, Rush’s advocacy of abstinence from drinking hard liquors became popular propaganda in thetemperance movement, around ﬁfty years after he published “An Inquiry
into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors . . .” in 1784. His pamphlet was
printed repeatedly and more than 170,000 copies were distributed by theAmerican Tract Society alone from 1825 to 1850.22
Another temperance movement emerged in 1840, when six heavy
drinkers in Baltimore organized a self-reform movement to promote teetotalism, abstinence from all liquors including wine and beer in addition
to whiskey and brandy. The leaders called themselves Washingtonians
simply because they respected George Washington. They advocated a“long pledge” because heavy drinkers could not draw a line between
fermented and distilled liquors. For them the former was also evil
because it tempted drinkers to try the latter, so their movement viewed
both moderate drinking as well as excessive drinking as taboo. A prototype of today’s Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the Washingtonian movement spread all over the country except some parts of the South in theﬁrst half of the 1840s and collected more than 600,000 signatures for thelong pledge, including those of many drunkards whom the previous organizations had either ignored or regarded as enemies.23
The Washingtonians held “experience meetings,” where former
drunkards spoke of their unfortunate experiences to audiences that
included people suffering from similar problems. They directly and persuasively appealed to drinkers that sobriety could bring them success,self-respect, and self-discipline. It is interesting to note that there were
two different reactions among drinkers who felt anxious in competitive,
industrial society: one was to drink more for relief from pressure and theother was to stop drinking for the same purpose.24 The Washingtonians
experienced both.

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As I have noted, the main reason that excessive drinking and, later,
moderate drinking were viewed as taboo by the temperance movementin the second quarter of the 19th century was the belief that it brought
misery to the men who drank and their families. Because of this, temperance propaganda repeatedly used pictures of individual ruin andunhappy family life. Temperance novels such as Timothy Arthur’s Ten
Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There, which dramatized theunhappy life of a very young girl whose father was a drunkard, provide
other examples of how this misery was portrayed.
III FROM MORAL SUASION TO LEGAL COERCION
From the middle of the 19th century, the nature of the temperance
movement began to change, as did the reason why it regarded excessive
drinking as taboo. The leaders of the movement came to emphasize theopinion that temperance contributed more to the public good than to theindividual good. In doing so, the temperance movement began to transform itself from one of personal reform to one of social reform.
This transformation had already begun before the 1850s, as a newgroup of industrialists joined the movement as leaders. After the ATS
was dissolved and a new, more centralized organization, the American
Temperance Union (ATU), was formed in 1836, the movement used
more secular, at the expense of religious, propaganda. Popular topics
were economics, social order and security, and moral themes. Examples
were drunkenness entailing losses for both employees and employers;
public money being spent on taking care of drunkards in jail; and drinking causing serious railroad, stagecoach, and steamboat accidents andbeing linked to gambling, prostitution, and violence.
As industrialization proceeded in America, capitalists encouraged
their employees to respect “industrial morality” and advocated abolishing such “wasteful habits” and premodern customs as the rum ration.25
Some laborers and artisans also supported temperance and, similar to the
Washingtonians, desired to be successful ﬁnancially, so they appealed
to their fellow laborers to be sober. Although it is not possible to state
precisely how much the early temperance activities contributed, theymight have helped reduce the annual per capita consumption of absolute
alcohol from 7.1 gallons in 1830 to 5.0 gallons in 1835 and to 3.1 gallons in 1840.26
However, we should not overlook the reality of this reduction.

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According to Rorabaugh, the reduction “did not mean that everyone
drank half as much [in 1840 as in 1830]; rather, almost half the population stopped drinking altogether, while the other half continued to drink
as much as before.”27 This statement oversimpliﬁed the real situation,
but he rightly implied that although the time when many people drank
too much had passed, and the number of teetotalers had increased, there
were still many people who continued to drink excessively, and theseremained as targets for perfectionists in the temperance movement. It is
important to see who such drinkers were.
Industrialization needed cheap and plentiful labor, but America had
always suffered from a shortage of manpower since early in its colonial
period, and the industrial capitalists in the middle of the 19th century andlater depended on foreign immigrants to provide labor. From the middleof the 1840s to the Civil War, most of the immigrants were either Irish
or Germans. Because of the potato blight which led to famine in Irelandfrom 1845 and oppression by the British government, many Irish people went to America. From 1847 to 1854 more than 100,000 Irish immigrants arrived annually in America with 220,000 as the peak in 1851.
Around the same time, many German immigrants went to America
because of political chaos after the abortive revolution in 1848, religious
persecution, and food shortages. In the ﬁrst half of the 1840s, the average number of German immigrants was about 20,000 annually. The number, however, increased to approximately 66,000 annually in the latter
half of the decade, and then more than 100,000 between 1852 and 1854
with 215,000 as the peak in 1854.28
Most Irish immigrants settled in such east coast cities as New Yorkand Boston to work in factories or on railroads. The Irish who settled in
Boston numbered fewer than 500 during the ﬁve-year period beginningin 1836, but they increased rapidly to more than 60,000 during the ﬁveyear period beginning in 1846.29 Many German immigrants, on the other
hand, went to the Middle West either to settle as farmers or to live incities such as Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee as factory workers.
The Irish and German immigrants who drank either whiskey or beer
habitually ignored the activities of the temperance reformers and continued their drinking customs in America. They came to see temperance
as nothing less than a new lifestyle being forced on them, which contributed to immigrants and excessive drinking being connected with eachother by the temperance movement. This tendency might be seen in thewords of one reformer who noted that the Irish “come here, with all their

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vicious [drinking] habits and grovelling tastes uncontrolled, and they
think they can make money at this thing, and they set to work. They have
had no previous training in habits of temperance, and they die out before
they are reclaimed.” 30
The Irish tended to frequent saloons whose owners were Irish and toloiter in streets at night after drinking, which occasionally led to arrests
because of disruptive behavior. Germans were accused of gathering atbeer halls on the Sabbath, and the beer halls came to be regarded disapprovingly by old-stock Americans because they were linked to such vices
as gambling and prostitution, as well as drinking, and became places
for political “machines” to “buy” votes for local elections. Reformers
believed that this went far beyond the ideals of society and should berectiﬁed. Moreover, most immigrants, coming from peasant stock, tended to ignore such indispensable industrial work ethics as observing working hours. These were real problems faced not only by ordinary citizens
but also by the temperance reformers.
From the middle of the 19th century, what was regarded as taboo inthe temperance movement was mainly excessive drinking by laborers,
many of whom were Irish and German immigrants. Incidentally, suchsocial problems as crime, violence, poverty, and disorder were directly
or indirectly linked with excessive drinking. In this context, the temperance movement broadened its outlook and began to transform its main
purpose from personal reform to social reform. This transformation
caused changes in the methods that the temperance movement employed.
Before the massive inﬂux of Irish and German immigrants, the temperance movement had had considerable success by using moral suasion, which might have helped reduce per capita consumption of alcohol.
At that time, viewing excessive drinking as taboo became common
among Americans living in a society that emphasized “respectability”
and “virtue.” 31 When, however, immigrants with different drinking habitssettled in the cities, where the population balance between Americans ofEnglish descent and the newcomers eventually evened out, “community restraints” disappeared and moral suasion no longer seemed to work.32
As a result, temperance reformers increasingly came to support somemethod of “coercion” rather than “suasion.” This new approach took adeﬁnite form in the Maine Law movement, which led to temporary prohibition laws banning the manufacture and sale of liquors being enacted in eleven states and two territories after Maine had done so with its
Act for the Suppression of Drinking Houses and Tippling Shops in 1851.

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Under such laws, liquor, once “a good creature of God,” became a “ﬁendlike monster,” “desperado,” and “serpent.” 33 In the Maine Law movement the prohibitionists sought social “order” and “stability.” 34 The ATU
reported that during the year before the Maine Law was promulgated,
74 persons were arrested and detained in reformatories in Maine due todisorderly conduct linked to excessive drinking, but one year after its
enactment there were none.35 Portland mayor Neal Dow, “the father ofthe Maine Law” as he was called, implied that the incidence of crimes
had been reduced to the point that city ofﬁcials could use “the Portland
City Watchhouse” only to store seized liquors, and he claimed proudlythat “the House of Correction is now empty.” 36 This success was frequently used to argue for extending the Maine Law movement to otherstates.
Unlike the earlier temperance movement, the new one which emphasized prohibition gave rise to bitter resistance. Those opposing prohibition included not only liquor manufacturers, dealers, and drinkers but
also many temperate Americans who considered prohibition to be
extreme because “the right of the individual to be free from government
intervention in purely private affairs received endorsement afterendorsement.”37 This led to public sentiment being aroused against prohibition, and Portland, where Dow tried to enforce the law strictly, experienced a bloody riot in 1855. Shortly before the Civil War, the issue ofslavery became the main concern for most Americans, so politicians inevery state tried to avoid other delicate issues such as prohibition. In statelegislatures after 1855 there were no attempts to make new Maine laws,
and state courts started to rule that all or part of their laws were unconstitutional so that only a few states, including Maine, maintained them
until the Civil War.
IV OTHER TABOOS
During the Civil War the temperance movement was sluggish.
Historically speaking, there had been a close relationship between wars
and liquor consumption, and the Civil War was not an exception. Evenso, there were some temperance associations in this period which helped
rehabilitate drunkards. They inherited the tradition of the early temperance movement, especially that of personal reform in Washingtonianism, and they included the Sons of Temperance (ST) and theIndependent Order of Good Templars (IOGT), organized respectively in“TABOO ” IN THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

67

1842 and 1851. Both groups kept the names of their members secretbecause when backsliding Washingtonians had become the focus of public attention, it hurt the movement as a whole. Both of the new organizations were mutual beneﬁt societies that pooled their funds to help
support members and their families in times of illness or death. They
were successful in rehabilitating members to a certain extent, but the
IOGT in particular came to be viewed suspiciously because of its
extreme secrecy. After the Civil War, the activities of the ST and the
IOGT were conﬁned to a relatively small group of drinkers, so they did
not become mainstream in the postwar temperance movement. We will
therefore focus on the more popular aspects of the movement.
The revitalization of the temperance movement after the Civil War
depended greatly on the leadership activities of female reformers, who
had been able to participate in the antebellum movement only as followers. They demonstrated leadership, for example, late in 1873 whensome groups of women in such towns in Ohio as Hillsboro andWashington Court House went to nearby saloons to ask the owners togive up their prosperous but immoral businesses. Inside the saloons,these female activists sang hymns, prayed, and stayed on the premises
until owners signed a pledge to close their doors. They chose saloons as
their targets because they were frequented by their husbands and sons
who spent money necessary for living on on drinking, gambling, andprostitutes.
These “saloon visitations”38 and other political activities by women
were regarded as taboo in terms of Victorian social norms, but the women
acted in the name of “home protection,” asserting that the victims ofexcessive drinking were children and wives. This was relatively easy formany people, especially Protestant Americans, to accept, and saloon visitations soon spread throughout parts of the country. Many saloon owners conceded to shut down, but after a short time, they reopened theirback doors at ﬁrst and ﬁnally their front doors.
Saloon visitations were therefore not completely successful, but they
did provide an opportunity for participants to organize a lasting female
temperance movement in 1874 with the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union (WCTU) as its center. Although the WCTU was organized by
women who looked at drinking and other immoral activities of their husbands and sons as taboo, its leaders thought that advocating only temperance was not enough to justify its existence as an organization forreform to women in general.

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In the middle of the 1870s the annual per capita consumption ofabsolute alcohol by Americans over 15 years of age was less than two
gallons. Moreover, the favorite alcoholic beverage for Americans waschanging from whiskey to beer. In the 1840s the annual per capita consumption of distilled liquors was 3.1 gallons (including 1.4 gallons ofabsolute alcohol), as opposed to 1.3 gallons of beer (including 0.07 gallons of absolute alcohol). In 1900 the consumption of distilled liquors
had decreased to 1.2 gallons (0.54 gallons), while that of beer had
increased dramatically to 15.5 gallons (0.78 gallons).39
As a result of this shift from hard liquor to beer, cases of physiological problems caused by drinking whiskey declined dramatically.
Because of this, the leaders of the WCTU broadened their outlook to
appeal to and to recuit more female activists by trying to ﬁnd taboos otherthan excessive drinking. Beyond referring only to personal drinking,they attempted to reform the surroundings of drinkers in which social
evils including excessive drinking took place. This tendency was accelerated after Frances Willard became the second president of the WCTU
in 1879. Using “do everything” as its slogan, the WCTU under Willard’s
leadership became “a school” for its members and urged them to extend
their concerns to such diverse social and political issues as prostitution,
public education, child labor, and female suffrage as well as temperance.40
At that time, the male temperance movement was dominated by apolitical party, the National Prohibition Party (NPP), which was organized in 1869 by splinter groups from the major parties, mostly the
Republicans, who thought it was impossible to enact prohibition laws
within the framework of the two-party system. According to the NPP
leaders, after the Internal Revenue Act of 1862 forced the liquor industry to pay a large amount of taxes, it cultivated favorable connections
with politicians in the Democratic and Republican Parties to protect its
interests. This gave the impression that “an ‘oligarchy’ of the liquor trafﬁc controlled Democratic and Republican affairs alike.” 41 The NPP tried
to win broad support by adding to its platform such diverse issues as the
direct election of the President, Vice-President, and U.S. Senators, lowrates for postage, telegraphic communication, and railroad and watertransportation, opposition to discrimination in voting because of race,
national origin, or sex, opposition to exploitation of labor by capitalists,
opposition to all monopoly and class legislation, and the creation andextension of common schools.42

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In the 1880s the WCTU and the NPP often allied with each other torevitalize the temperance movement, sharing the belief that temperance
was an important, but not the only, issue to help reform society. The mainfeature of the early temperance movement, that only excessive drinking
was regarded as taboo, faded away in their alliance. Although the stateprohibition movement was revitalized in the 1880s, only Kansas, North
Dakota, and South Dakota managed to pass state-wide prohibition laws.
Even in those states, it was the temperance Republicans, not the Party
prohibitionists, who contributed the most to getting the laws passed.
Because the temperance movement was led by women with no voting
rights and by politicians who did not belong to the two major parties, it
exerted almost no political inﬂuence, so leadership again was assumed
by clergymen and businessmen.
V

BEFORE AND AFTER NATIONAL PROHIBITION

Around the turn of the century, another large wave of immigrants went
to America, and most of the more than one million people arriving annually in the early years of the 20th century were from eastern and southern Europe. This increased the ethnic diversity of America and createdan environment for revising cultural norms. As a response, the temperance movement at the turn of the century was strongly supported byProtestant Americans, as in the 1850s, because they saw it as a vehicle
for assimilating the new immigrants.
From the late 19th century the movement was led by the Anti-Saloon
League of America (ASL) which was strongly linked to Protestantchurches. It was organized nationally in late 1895 and tried to enact
national as well as state prohibition laws. Learning much from the lesssuccessful movement led by the WCTU and the NPP, the ASL focusedsolely upon temperance. It became a powerful pressure group to support
politicians who espoused prohibition regardless of party afﬁliation. The
prohibition movement led by the ASL was successful in getting the 18th
Amendment added to the U.S. Constitution, which went into effect at
midnight, January 16, 1920.
At the turn of the century, small, local communities were further integrated into the national economy and society with the completion of ﬁve
transcontinental railways and the emergence of national markets as symbolic events of this transformation. At the time a broad movement called
Progressivism emerged to promote reforms to cope with the new, high-70

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ly industrialized consumer society of the early 20th century. It aimed tostrengthen the regulatory powers of local, state, and federal governments
to correct problems that had arisen from the practice of laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century.
The prohibition movement under the leadership of the ASL also aimed
at social reform through governmental regulatory powers as the 20th
century approached. In this context, the prohibition movement was one
aspect of Progressivism and therefore differed greatly from the temperance movement almost one hundred years earlier, which had regarded
excessive drinking as dangerous only for the drinkers. The new movement for prohibition had two ultimate purposes: social and political
puriﬁcation and labor efﬁciency in an industrializing society. As for theformer, the ASL tried to disrupt the liquor industries by focusing mainly on saloons and breweries. Saloons, as mentioned previously, wereconsidered to be immoral because they were linked to gambling, smoking, and prostitution as well as binge drinking, and they were also thought
to be evil because they had become bases for machine politics. These“poorman’s clubs,” as they were often called at the turn of the century,
were frequented mainly by laborers, many of whom were newcomers
from the same ethnic background as the owners of the saloons.
Light diversion was not the only reason that customers frequented
saloons after a long day of hard work. The newcomers gathered to seek
someone to help ﬁnd places to stay and jobs to make money, while speaking to other patrons in their own languages. Many saloon owners were
elected to ofﬁce by ethnic voters, and some of them became “precinct
bosses” who assisted opponents of prohibition aspiring to public ofﬁce
by gathering votes at their saloons. If such a candidate won an election,
he would then distribute many public jobs such as those in police andﬁre departments through the “precinct bosses.” This activity served as aform of social welfare for many newcomers, but from the perspective of
the ASL leaders, it was political favoritism and corruption that needed
to be eliminated.
The other ultimate purpose in the prohibition movement was to meetthe requirements for labor in an industrializing society. Industrial capitalists intended to build safer factories and to increase productivity by
reducing the consumption of liquor by factory workers. When theyjoined the temperance movement in the middle of the 19th century, they
had the same intention of increasing productivity. Capitalists at bothtimes, although the stages of industrialization were different, shared a“TABOO ” IN THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

71

common anxiety about their workers drinking excessively, and they wereconvinced that correcting this problem would lead to fewer absences andaccidents and more productivity.
It is not important to discuss here how much national prohibition
accomplished these purposes. Journalism, in any case, tended to address
such “side effects” as waves of crime, the tendency to disregard laws,
and the illegal production and importation of liquors. Moreover, theGreat Depression which started in 1929 accelerated public opinion
against the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, the law that enforced
it. Eventually the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment
on December 5, 1933, which ended one cycle in the temperance movement. It did not, however, mean the end of the whole movement.
As suggested in Section 2 of the 21st Amendment—“The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the UnitedStates for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of
the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited”—the repeal of the 18th Amendment did not automatically allow limitless manufacture and sale ofliquors. Liquors were legal again, but they were subject to regulations
on advertising, places to sell, and business hours, as well as to taxation.
Fifteen states went as far as imposing state sales monopolies to enforce
such regulations and taxation.43 Even though many state prohibition
laws, often called “little Volsteads,” had been repealed before December
1933, some remained in effect until well after World War II: Kansas until
1948, Oklahoma until 1957, and Mississippi until 1966.
In 1935, a new cycle in the temperance movement began when
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was established in Akron, Ohio, by two
alcoholics (formerly “drunkards”), William Wilson, a former Wall Street
manipulator, and Robert Smith, a doctor. This new organization bore aclose resemblance to Washingtonianism in its emphasis on rehabilitating chronic drinkers, and both began in periods of national economic
difﬁculty. The AA appealed directly to the self-respect of drinkers byholding clandestine meetings that were designed to instil courage torefrain from drinking. By protecting the privacy of its members, the AA
succeeded in recuiting and reclaiming many alcoholics throughout
America. Because of its policy of secrecy, it is not known precisely how
many people joined, but its membership has been estimated to have had
more than 100,000 Americans in 1951 and to have included 350,000
Americans and Canadians in the 1970s.44
Medical doctors who specialized in the digestive system, physiology,

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and psychiatry also joined the temperance movement after alcohol was
legalized again. They organized the Association for the Study ofInebriety and focused on the problem of excessive drinking in terms ofphysiological diseases. In 1940 the Center of Alcohol Studies was founded at Yale University with E. M. Jellinek as its director. The doctors andresearchers at Yale argued that alcoholism was a mental as well as aphysiological disease so that “patients” should be treated with “medical
and psychiatric attention,” and they published the results of their studies in their Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol.45
Benjamin Rush, in the last quarter of the 18th century, was one of theearliest medical experts to suggest that habitual drinking was a disease
and should be treated medically, but the majority of doctors since thenhad not accepted the idea that drunkenness was a disease.46 Rather, they
had tended to view it as taboo in moral terms, which indicated that excessive drinking was done only by weak people. Finally, in the middleof the 1950s, the American Medical Association ofﬁcially recognizedalcoholism as a disease. As a result, patients could receive insurance
beneﬁts, and specialists could obtain more research funds to study
alcoholism.47
In the liberal atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, the annual per capita consumption of absolute alcohol rose from 2.0 gallons in 1960 to 2.8
gallons in 1978. Female drinkers and adolescent drinkers contributed
much to this increase. In the late 1970s intoxicated drivers caused about
half of nearly 50,000 annual automobile accident fatalities. Under thesecircumstances, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was organizedin 1980 as a new pressure group. This organization, concerned about theincrease in fatal automobile accidents caused by drunken drivers, especially young ones, demanded federal legislation to put pressure on thestate governments to ban the sale of alcohol to anyone under 21 years
old. Their effort succeeded in 1984 when Congress coerced the states toadopt such a policy.
As for female drinking, in the 1970s scientiﬁc research discovered thateven as little as a few drinks during early pregnancy caused high risksof birth defects. Because of such laws and ﬁndings, the consumption ofabsolute alcohol declined in the 1980s and 1990s and stabilized at around
two gallons per capita. In this regard, the modern temperance movement—involving the likes of the AA, medical research and attention, andlegislation stemming from pressure groups such as MADD—experienced some success in reducing the consumption of alcohol.

“TABOO ” IN THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT73

CONCLUSION
As discussed, excessive drinking had always been regarded as tabooin the temperance movement for two reasons. First, the immoderate useof alcohol was taboo because it was harmful to drinkers and brought misfortune to their families. Second, it was taboo because it caused or wasotherwise linked to other social evils. When the temperance movement
focused on the former, it emphasized personal reform, and social reform
was its aim when it turned its attention to the latter. It has shifted between
the two according to temporal perceptions of problems associated withalcohol abuse.
Especially in the second quarter of the 19th century, the temperance
movement was concerned with personal degradation which prevented
the formation of an ideal society. At the time “moral suasion” had proved
to be relatively effective because many drinkers voluntarily gave up
alcohol or dramatically reduced how much they consumed. Then, during the period from the Maine Law movement to the repeal of the 18th
Amendment, a perfectionist impulse to purify society dominated thetemperance movement. By means of prohibition laws, it speciﬁcallyattacked urban saloons as a symbol of social evil. Saloons were viewed
by reformers as places not only for drunkenness, but also for politicalcorruption, prostitution, gambling, smoking, and other vices.
The repeal of the 18th Amendment caused the temperance movement
to go in a different direction, one that was not new but which looked toan earlier stage of the movement. The temperance movement then reincorporated moral suasion, while still depending on legal measures. In theprocess it abandoned the long-held belief that temperance was an instrument for social reform and the panacea to deal with various kinds of problems. The history of excessive drinking and the temperance movementshows how the consumption of alcohol changed as a taboo in American
life.

NOTES
1
In this paper, “temperance” is used ﬂexibly. The term basically means the “advocacy of moderation” so that it meant “moderate drinking of distilled liquors” in the early
19th century. “Temperance,” however, came to assume the more severe tone of “abstinence from distilled liquors” when the American Temperance Society was organized in

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1826. Later, it came to mean “total abstinence from all liquors including fermented
drinks.” At ﬁrst, methods to advocate “temperance” fell within the domain of “moral
suasion”: distributing printed propaganda, holding meetings for religious sermons, andsigning pledges, for instance. From the middle of the 19th century, however, the temperance movement assumed a political character, advocating a coercive measure known
as “prohibition.” This movement is usually isolated as the “prohibition movement,” butin this paper it is categorized within the temperance movement.
2
Daniel Dorchester, The Liquor Problem in All Ages (New York: Phillips & Hunt,
1884), 110.
3
W. J. Rorabaugh, “Estimated U.S. Alcoholic Beverage Consumption, 1790–1860,”
Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 37 (1976): 361.
4John Krout, The Origin of Prohibition (New York: Russel & Russel, 1925), 52.
5
Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, ed. Kenneth B. Murdock (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1977), 192.
6
The New England Society in the City of New York, Plymouth Church Records(Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1975), vol. 2, 157.
7
Dean Albertson, “Puritan Liquor in the Planting of New England,” The New England
Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1950): 485.
8
Ibid., 488; Edward G. Baird, “The Alcohol Problem and the Law: The Beginningsof the Alcoholic-Beverage Control Law in America,” Quarterly Journal of Studies on
Alcohol 7 (1946–1947): 280; John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of
Prohibition (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 35; Charles W. Taussig, Rum,
Romance & Rebellion (London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1928), 210–211.
9
Krout, The Origin of Prohibition, 72.
10J. G. Furnas, The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum (New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1965), 20.
11
The price of one bottle of whiskey was about ﬁve cents. This was relatively cheap
because a farmhand could earn almost one dollar a day at that time.
12
Rorabaugh, “Estimated U.S. Alcoholic Beverage Consumption,” 361; Encyclopediaof American Social History, 1993 ed., “Alcohol and Alcoholism,” 2137.
13
E. M. Jellinek, “Recent Trends in Alcoholism and in Alcohol Consumption,”
Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 8 (1947): 9.
14Peter D. Slavcheff, “The Temperance Republic: Liquor Control in Michigan
1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1987), 1.
15
Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976), 225.
16
James H. Cassedy, “An Early American Hangover: The Medical Profession andIntemperance 1800–1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50 (1976): 406.
17
Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the
Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 4.
18
For example, in 1830 the tariff on coffee was abolished. As a result, its price fell
from 25 cents per pound in 1825 to ten cents, which made coffee a popular drink. W. J.
Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 100.
19
Clark, Deliver Us from Evil, 224.
20
Slavcheff, “The Temperance Republic,” 12. Incidentally, more than 90 percent of
absolute alcohol was consumed in the form of distilled spirits; see Selden D. Bacon,“The Classic Temperance Movement,” British Journal of Addiction 62 (1967): 7.
21
Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, 151.

“TABOO ” IN THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

75

22
Alice F. Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History from theColonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil War (New York: Harper & Row, 1944),
314.
23
According to Maxwell, out of the 600,000, only about 100,000 were heavy drinkers
and the rest included many female non-drinkers and children. Milton A. Maxwell, “TheWashingtonian Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 11 (1950):
426–427.
24
Joseph F. Kett, “Review Essay: Temperance and Intemperance as Historical
Problems,” Journal of American History 67 (1981): 880.
25Paul Faler, “Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts,
Shoemakers and Industrial Morality, 1826–1860,” Labor History 15 (1974): 368.
26
Rorabaugh, “Estimated U.S. Alcoholic Beverage Consumption,” 361.
27
Encyclopedia of American Social History, “Alcohol and Alcoholism,” 2138.
28
Amerika Shomusho Hen, Amerika Rekishi Tokei [Historical Statistics of the UnitedStates] (Tokyo: Hara Shobo, 1986), 106.
29
Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1959), 242.
30
A. Farewell and G. P. Ure, The Maine Law Illustrated: Being the Result of an
Investigation Made in the Maine Law States (Toronto: Canadian Prohibitory Liquor Law
League, 1855), 49.
31
Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum
America, 1800–1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 317.
32Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder, 5.
33James R. Rohrer, “The Origins of the Temperance Movement: A Reinterpretation,”
Journal of American Studies 24 (1990): 230.
34
Clark, Deliver Us from Evil, 120. See also Jack S. Blocker Jr., American Temperance
Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1989), 53.
35
American Temperance Union, An Appeal to the Public from Well AuthenticatedResults of the Maine Law (New York: ATU, 1854), 6.
36
Neal Dow, “Operation of the Liquor Law in Portland,” January 15, 1852 in the Neal
Dow Papers (Portland: Maine Historical Society).
37
David E. Kyvig, ed., Law, Alcohol, and Order: Perspectives on National Prohibition(Westpoint, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 6.
38
Saloon visitations might be interpreted as a form of rebellion against male domination of society and seen as a precursor to the activities of Carry Nation, who attacked
saloons with a hatchet early in the 20th century since she saw them as such a symbol.
See Masaru Okamoto, Amerika Kinshuundo no Kiseki [History of the American
Temperance Movement] (Kyoto: Mineruva Shobo, 1994), 169–172.
39
Rorabaugh calculates that the absolute alcohol content of distilled liquors was estimated at 45% and of beer, 5%. See his “Estimated U.S. Alcoholic Beverage Consumption,” 361.
40
Frances E. Willard, My Happy Half-Century: The Autobiography of an American
Woman (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1889), 379.
41
K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 42.
42Donald B. Johnson, comp., National Party Platforms, vol. 1 (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1978), 45–46.
43
Blocker, American Temperance Movements, 135.
44
Ibid., 143. Membership worldwide was estimated to be 1,000,000 in the 1970s.

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45
John Ewing and Beatrice Rouse, eds., Drinking: Alcohol in American Society—
Issues and Current Research (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 54.
46
When the temperance movement began in the early 19th century, many doctors did
not cooperate with it. They continued to use liquors as medicine, while drinking themas luxuries. For a long period of time they agreed with religious leaders that drunkenness was an evil which affected only degenerated people with weak wills. Drunkards
were therefore often treated as lunatics and put in jail or an asylum. It was during the1920s that the term “alcoholism” began to replace “drunkenness” or “inebriety.” See
Cassedy, “An Early American Hangover,” 407; Ewing and Rouse, Drinking, 43–44 and51.
47
Ibid., 58.