Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse. Alcohol looms large in American history, and attitudes toward it have been linked to myriad reformist causes; reflected many social concerns; and mirrored the prevailing cultural, political, and economic climate of successive eras.
Alcoholic beverages, whether rum distilled from West Indian sugar, home‐brewed beer, or imported wines, were widely consumed in colonial America, and the physician‐statesman Benjamin
Rush targeted them in his widely reprinted
Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind (1784). Fearful for the new republic, Rush recoiled at the prospect of intoxicated voters shaping its destiny—no small concern at a time when elections often featured heavy drinking. Annual per capita consumption of absolute alcohol when Rush wrote ranged between four and six gallons (twice the rate in 2000), and evidence suggests a further sharp rise between 1800 and 1830. The profitability of corn whiskey, heavy frontier drinking, the spread of saloons in cities, and the
immigration of beer‐drinking Germans and whiskey‐swilling Irish all encouraged the nation's bibulous tendencies.
These tendencies elicited a reaction within the Protestant churches, however, which linked salvation with temperance and other reforms. The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance (ASPT), founded by Evangelical clergymen in 1826, also gained support from farmers, industrialists, and homemakers. Indeed, the temperance campaign—really a series of reform drives—comprised the nineteenth century's longest and largest social‐reform movement. Alcohol was seen as imperiling capitalist enterprise, domestic tranquility, and the national virtue. By 1836 the ASPT, renamed the American Temperance Society, advocated total abstinence. In the early 1840s, Americans thronged to temperance rallies, “took the pledge” for sobriety, and in record numbers lobbied to end the licensing of saloons. The Washingtonian movement, a grassroots total‐abstinence campaign, sponsored parades and speeches; offered recruits financial and moral assistance; and established institutions for inebriates—Washingtonian Homes—that relied on moral suasion to keep residents sober. The Washingtonian enthusiasm soon gave way to better‐organized temperance fellowships, such as the Good Templars and the Blue Ribbon societies. The late
Antebellum Era also saw renewed middle‐class drives for local and state prohibition. In the 1850s, eleven states passed prohibitory legislation, although most were soon repealed.
The
brewing and distilling industries expanded after the
Civil War, and alcohol consumption, especially in the immigrant cities, remained high. But the temperance movement revived as well, linking “Demon Rum” to concerns about immigration, workplace efficiency, social welfare, and urban political corruption. Frances
Willard's
Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) redefined temperance, along with other reforms, as a women's issue involving home protection. At the WCTU's prompting, Congress mandated the inclusion of “scientific” temperance instruction in high‐school physiology texts.
This era of social reorganization and professionalization also brought the first widespread attempt to medicalize drunkenness. The American Association for the Cure of Inebriates (AACI), founded in 1870 by physicians and reformers, promoted the concept of inebriety as a hereditary disease exacerbated by chronic debauchery. As their drinking progressed, the AACI contended, inebriates lost control of their actions and required restorative medical and moral treatment. Envisioning a new medical speciality to address this ailment, the AACI built a network of private institutions to treat habitual drunkards. California, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, and other states followed suit. In this age of industrial
capitalism, the goal was to restore inebriates' economic productivity as well as their willpower. The AACI faded as the prohibition movement grew, however; by 1920, most of the inebriate institutions had closed, and habitual drunkenness was again viewed as primarily a moral, political, and legal issue.
The church‐based Anti‐Saloon League (ASL), meanwhile, founded in 1895 and supported by industrialists like Henry
Ford and Pierre
du Pont, spearheaded the prohibition drive. Under superintendent Wayne Wheeler, the ASL's innovative bipartisan lobbying approach secured prohibitory state legislation and, in 1919, ratification of the
Eighteenth Amendment, establishing nationwide prohibition. A
World War I reaction against German American–owned breweries and fears that alcohol would undermine the nation's military contributed to this success.
But many Americans, especially in the cities, rejected prohibition; speakeasies flourished and bootleg liquor flowed freely in many municipalities. With repeal in 1933, the nation entered what some scholars have called an “Age of Ambivalence” about alcohol. The reopened breweries and distilleries advertised heavily to win new customers. As old taboos faded, alcohol consumption spread widely. In the later twentieth century, wine connoisseurship spread and U.S. wine production flourished in
California and elsewhere. While the major breweries dominated the beer market, imported brands and local microbreweries also flourished.
Simultaneously, however, antialcohol sentiment remained powerful in evangelical Protestantism; in such organizations as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA, 1935) and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), founded in 1980 and boasting some six hundred chapters nationwide by 2000; and in heightened concern about college binge drinking, alcohol‐related domestic abuse, and fetal alcohol syndrome. Beginning in the early 1980s, these efforts, coupled with
health and fitness concerns, spurred a slow decline in per capita alcohol consumption.
These years also saw renewed debate over the nature of alcoholism. AA founders William Wilson and Robert Smith, a physician, along with the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism, led a crusade to treat alcoholism as a disease. In the 1950s, the biostatistician E.M. Jellinek of the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies promoted a multistage model of alcohol addiction based on his research on AA members. But the disease concept met criticism as well. The
American Medical Association in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged physicians to treat alcoholism's “medical aspects” but argued that labeling alcoholism a disease did not relieve individuals of responsibility for their intoxicated behavior. The
Supreme Court concurred, declining to exonerate persons for actions committed while drunk. Although the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) was established in 1971, lending federal support and funding to alcoholism studies, some social scientists, including ones funded by the NIAAA, mustered evidence discrediting the disease model. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the emergence of a broad‐based
public‐health approach oriented toward preventing excessive drinking.
As the century ended, what some called a neotemperance movement gained momentum, linked to the antitobacco and antidrug campaigns. In the mid‐1990s, however, the nation still had nearly thirty thousand liquor stores, many supermarkets and convenience outlets sold beer and wine, and more than half of adult Americans regularly drank alcoholic beverages. Alcohol's central role in American culture, if somewhat diminished, seemed firmly entrenched.
See also
Advertising;
Drugs, Illicit;
Leisure;
Mass Marketing;
Medicine;
Popular Culture;
Temperance and Prohibition;
Tobacco Products;
Twenties, The;
Working‐Class Life and Culture.
Bibliography
American Association for the Cure of Inebriates , Proceedings, 1870–1875, 1981.
Mark Lender and and James Kirby Martin , Drinking in America: A History, rev. ed., 1987.
Craig Reinarman , The Social Construction of an Alcohol Problem: The Case of Mothers against Drunk Drivers and Social Control in the 1980s, Theory and Society 17 (1988): 91–120.
Jack Blocker , American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform, 1989.
Peter Conrad and and Joseph Schneider , Alcoholism: Drunkenness, Inebriety, and the Disease Concept, in Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness, rev. ed., 1992, pp.73–109.
William L. White , Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America, 1998.
Sarah W. Tracy
