TEMPERANCE

Since the founding of the thirteen colonies, the robust consumption and at times equally vigorous regulation of alcohol have coexisted in uneasy tension. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alcohol was served at nearly every occasion and workers regularly drank beer or wine while on the job. Benjamin Franklin, for example, writes in his Autobiography (1771) that his coworkers relied on an alehouse boy to bring them beer several times a day because they believed that strong beer led to a strong body. Founders of early towns often erected the church and tavern first, suggesting townsfolk's equal devotion to the Spirit and spirits.

Scholars estimate that in 1830, the average U.S. citizen drank an astonishing 7 gallons of alcohol per year; in comparison, statistics from 1985 suggest Americans drink 2.6 gallons per person annually (Lender and Marin, p. 95). Such a reduction in alcohol consumption certainly owes much to the technological innovation of drinking-water purification (beer and wine offered a more hygienic option than untreated water). But the temperance movement, with its moral suasion techniques and legal ramifications, also helped convince people to put down the bottle. The temperance crusade expanded in the early-nineteenth-century United States and swept through the country as a result of the nation's long history of overindulgence in alcohol. The drive eventually led to the twentieth-century national ban on the liquor trade and helped shape American identity as anti-liquor reformers strove to make self-control and public virtue issues of national concern.

Temperance workers' arguments were many: that inebriation enslaved the body and will as perniciously as did the slave trade, that alcoholism caused men to lose their jobs and impoverish their families, that too much drink degraded one's health, and that drunkenness indicated a sinful life. With its emphasis on restriction and control of the self, the temperance movement appeared traditional and conservative compared to the liberal and progressive campaigns of suffrage and abolition. Whereas temperance advocated the retraction of rights, the suffrage and abolition efforts championed the expansion of rights. Nonetheless, the women's movement stemmed from the organizational skills that women honed in their temperance work. Susan B. Anthony, a foundational member of the women's suffrage movement, began as a temperance worker; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another pivotal early suffragist, wrote the temperance story "Henry Neil and His Mother" (1849–1850). Anthony, Stanton, and others argued that women needed the ballot in order to defeat the bottle.

LITERARY IMAGES AND USES OF ALCOHOL

Because alcoholism and efforts to combat it have been so pervasive in American culture, the images and passions associated with both intoxication and sobriety have appealed to numerous writers. Authors have used drink to structure plots, to signal character types, to embellish a theme, to teach a lesson, and to espouse a cause. The American Temperance Union, an organization devoted to the dry cause, recognized the capability of temperance fiction to disseminate anti-alcohol propaganda to large numbers of readers. In 1836 members voted to endorse the use of such literature, especially didactic tracts, to spread its message. By 1865 the National Temperance Society had become a publisher of temperance fiction, which assured it a public voice in the fight against intemperance.

Much, although certainly not all, antebellum temperance fiction enjoyed success by adhering to a formula: a country boy who moves to the city in search of work and excitement, or a struggling or unemployed father, tastes alcohol for the first time and slides down the slippery slope to drunken degradation, poverty, and death. Such a formula ingrained U.S. literature with anti-liquor imagery. Often didactic, and sometimes intolerably so, temperance literature exhorted the values of a dry republic and denounced the lifestyle of the drunkard. In contrast to the twentieth-century conception of alcoholism as a disease, nineteenth-century temperance stories understood inebriation as a sign of moral weakness and the drinker as the bearer of a moral defect. Temperance literature tried to identify and expose the ills of alcohol and convince drinkers to turn to a life of prosperous and virtuous sobriety.

Such moralistic messages tried to influence the behavior of droves of unmarried men who moved to the cities in search of work. These young men generally lived away from rectifying home environments, in boardinghouses that, without a mother figure to monitor the men's behavior, were thought to lead to a gradual loosening of morals. Transient and unsupervised young men thus found themselves susceptible to the big-city temptations, both sexual and alcoholic, of saloons, bars, musical drinking houses, and brothels. Drinking became linked to masturbation since both were considered nonproductive, wasteful, excessive, and indulgent behaviors.

THE RISE OF TEMPERANCE FICTION

The decades between 1835 and 1860, commonly known as the American Renaissance, produced two temperance best-sellers, George Cheever's The True History of Deacon Giles' Distillery (1835) and Timothy Shay Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854). Many other authors wrote works that thematized alcohol: Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a popular satiric temperance tale, "A Rill from the Town Pump" (1835), Edgar Allan Poe chillingly described alcohol's depraved powers in "The Black Cat" (1843) and "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), and temperance imagery made its way into various major works of the period, including Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Emily Dickinson's poems, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life (1845), and William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853). As well, Walt Whitman wrote formulaic temperance pieces: "Young Grimes" (1840), "Wild Frank's Return" (1841), "The Child and the Profligate" (1841), "Reuben's Last Wish" (1842), and Franklin Evans (1842).

According to David S. Reynolds, U.S. reformers strategically used what Reynolds terms conventional, sensational, and legalistic discourses to combat intemperance. Conventional discourse, typified by some novels and by some of the sermons of evangelical preachers like Lyman Beecher, featured relatively tame liquor imagery and emphasized the moral and physical rewards of abstinence. Stressing a medical model, Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote about drink's ill effects on the mind and body.

Sensational discourse, according to Reynolds, stemmed from the eighteenth century and was greatly intensified by the Washingtonians, a group of exdrunkards who regularly held "experience meetings" in the 1840s in which they revealed the details of their depraved lives before their conversion to abstinence. Their violent and lurid descriptions of alcohol's ravages and domestic violence and their titillating confessions provided a fertile source of literary themes and images. People eagerly read and listened to the degeneracy and wickedness they supposedly protested; Whitman's Franklin Evans exemplifies Washingtonian temperance discourse.

Legalistic discourse dominated after the Civil War. Such discourse can be associated with the prohibitionist movement, which produced a series of state laws banning the sale of alcohol, laws that presaged the advent of national prohibition with the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. The prohibitionary rhetoric of temperance literature aligned it with conservative moral reformist efforts, such as the male purity movement, that sought to limit individuals' actions.

It is also important to consider that many popular temperance authors did not write about alcohol at all. That is, abstinence from alcohol did not constitute the whole of the temperance movement. Temperance women, concerned that their men and boys might someday become drinkers, advocated sobriety and a vision of society in which all members engaged in productive, healthful activity. Drinkers were not welcome in fictional worlds that imagined a range of useful opportunities and occupations available to all citizens. A glance through collections of temperance tales, similar to gift books in the 1840s and 1850s, reveals many positive and moralistic stories that portray fulfilling lives free from any references to drink. Temperance collections of stories, poems, and essays demonstrate the value of being temperate in all appetites and the moral benefits to society and the self that result from general sobriety.

POST–CIVIL WAR TEMPERANCE LITERATURE

If the temperance movement burned strongly in the antebellum years, it cooled during the Civil War as energies were otherwise occupied with sectional and national issues. Many taverns and saloons took advantage of the distraction and opened unlicensed establishments governed by few restrictions.

After the Civil War the temperance crusade became one of innumerable efforts responding to the growth of an urban-industrial America. In many ways the movement was dominated by the issue of prohibition. In 1870 Ohio passed the Adair Law, which granted wives and children of alcoholic men the right to bring suit against saloon owners to recover damages.

From 1870 to the 1919 passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, writers used alcoholic themes in various ways: to offer both social satire and social critique, to explore autobiographically their own inner demons, to elevate African Americans' status, to highlight the modernist sense of alienation, and to contrast a wet Europe to a dry United States.

The years 1873 and 1874 witnessed what came to be known as the Women's Crusades, in which housewives led pray-ins in saloons and successfully drove alcohol out of 250 communities in three months. In the summer of 1874 many women held organizational meetings at Chautauqua Institution in New York State; the following November, in Cleveland, they founded the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) with Annie Wittenmyer as president. Under the leadership of Frances E. Willard and her "Do Everything" campaign, in the 1880s the WCTU became the largest and most important women's organization. It is still active today.

One particular member of the WCTU colorfully directed her own crusade. Carry A. Nation, inspired by her own religious vision, led groups of hatchet-bearing women into saloons to smash the symbol of male domination and exclusion. Her "hatchetation" career galvanized the country's attention even as it landed her in jail over thirty times from coast to coast. Carry Nation founded and published two newspapers, Smasher's Mail and The Hatchet, and helped found The Home Defender. Yet because of her reputation as a crazy religious fanatic and overly brazen woman, neither religious groups nor the WCTU itself claimed her as their own.

WOMEN TEMPERANCE FICTION WRITERS

Although the female alcoholic remained largely invisible in temperance literature, alcoholism was very much a woman's concern: beholden to her husband, a woman's security depended on having a sober and responsible spouse. Tavern culture lured intemperate husbands away from domesticity and emptied their pockets of the money their wives needed to run a home. Numerous temperance stories, many written by women, contrast the ruin and loneliness of the drunkard's family with the bliss and strength of the temperate man's family. Temperance fiction allowed women the socially sanctioned space to explore such sensitive women's issues as a husband's infidelity, physical abuse, victimization, and social, legal, and economic injustice. In addition, such fiction established women writers as important bearers of moral culture; the popularity of their titles made them a force to be reckoned with in the literary marketplace. The temperance lecturer John B. Gough strongly believed in women's power of moral suasion and wrote in his book Platform Echoes (1885) that "Many and many a man has been saved by waking to the consciousness that some tender-hearted, pure woman felt some sympathy for him and some interest in him, though he was debased and degraded" (p. 530).

Most nineteenth-century women's temperance fiction was written in the 1840s and 1850s, but the founding of the WCTU in 1874 renewed interest in the genre. For example, the National Temperance Society and Publication House published many popular works, including Mary Dwinell Chellis's Wealth and Wine (1874) and Our Homes (1881) and Julia Perkins Ballard's The Hole in the Bag (1872). Other popular postbellum fiction includes Marietta Holley's Sweet Cicely (1885), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Jack the Fisherman (1887), Louisa May Alcott's Silver Pitchers; and Independence, a Centennial Love Story (1876) and her "Good Templars" (1908). In Alcott's best-known work, Little Women (1868), she hints at her interest in the temperance cause and develops it further in her other adventures of the March sisters (Jo's Boys, 1886, and Rose in Bloom, 1876).

Whereas many nineteenth-century romance novels end with the heroine's future blissfully secured by a happy match, temperance fiction often begins with a poor match and details the downward spiral. Nina Baym thus claims a generic difference between woman's fiction and temperance fiction: "In striking contrast to woman's fiction, which frequently uses the motif of the drunkard, the temperance novel stresses, as it must, the failure or inadequacy of feminine moral influence to solve this problem. Many women sacrifice themselves and exert influence to no avail. A temperance novel must show woman's power as insufficient because its purpose is to get temperance legislation passed. Were feminine power all that was needed, the 'Maine Laws' would not be required" (p. 267).

WOMEN TEMPERANCE POETS

Although women's temperance fiction dominated the popular imagination, many female writers also wrote anti-alcohol poetry. Lydia Sigourney (1791–1865), one of the nineteenth century's most prolific poets, protested alcohol abuse in verse. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) parlayed her temperance activism into meter and rhyme from the 1850s on; her numerous postbellum drink-related poems include the 1886 poems "Signing the Pledge," "Save the Boys," and "Nothing and Something" and the 1889 poem "The Fatal Pledge." Seldom is her message vague; Harper explicitly linked drink to sin and degradation.

Another great nineteenth-century poet, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), also drew heavily upon popular temperance imagery. In such poems as "I bring an unaccustomed wine" (c. 1859, first published 1891), "We—Bee and I—live by the quaffing—" (1861, first published 1929), "A Drunkard cannot meet a Cork" (c. 1884, first published 1945), and "The Ditch is dear to the Drunken man" (c. 1885, first published 1945), Dickinson does not advocate sobriety, nor does she condemn inebriation. Rather, she uses images of drinking and drunkenness as metaphors to explore such phenomena as her own relationship to nature and transcendence. Perhaps her most famous poem that uses temperance imagery is "I taste a liquor never brewed—." In the poem the speaker boasts of her ability to consume huge quantities of alcohol, but the alcohol seems to be spiritual since it is not actually brewed. Instead the poet uses alcoholic imagery to celebrate the intoxicating nature of everyday existence. She literally gets high on life. The poem uses many standard drink-related terms such as "quaffing," "hock," "ale," "burgundy," "wines," "drunk," "pledges" (a reference to the temperance pledge of abstinence), "flagons," and so on, but the terms are used to describe the natural occasion of bees consuming nectar. Thus Dickinson converts potentially dark and degrading images into a celebration of life.

IMMIGRATION AND NATURALISM

The influx of immigrant populations to the United States, especially in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, affected the representation of alcohol. Many European immigrants flooded to the United States from the late 1860s through the early 1900s, with each ethnic group bringing its own drinking culture. After the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, when the United States annexed California and its grape culture, the California wine industry boomed. If antebellum temperance efforts were directed at the native-born citizenry, the postbellum anti-alcohol movement became infused with anti-immigrant agitation against, for example, the Irish Catholic who generally drank quite heavily. For a literary illustration, we can turn to Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" (1898), which singles out the Swede as the heavy drinker whose erroneous beliefs and drunken behavior lead to his death.

The work of Stephen Crane (1871–1900) is often assigned to the literary genre of naturalism, a genre particularly suited to exploring the role and effects of alcohol. Naturalism, perhaps a more pessimistic form of realism, can be thought of as a literary form influenced by scientific principles of objectivity, the determining factors of heredity, the forces of the environment, and the perception of a universe indifferent to human fate. The French naturalist writer Émile Zola greatly influenced U.S. writers, especially with his novel L'Assommoir (1877), which portrays the bars and abuse of absinthe that contribute to the grinding poverty of the laundress Gervaise. Crane's novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) clearly links alcohol to slum conditions, abusive families, and prostitution. In keeping with the genre of naturalism, Maggie suggests that certain environmental and social conditions contribute to the abuse of alcohol.

Crane was undoubtedly influenced by Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890), which used the new technology of flash photography to document the lives and working conditions of the poor. Both of Crane's parents fervently advocated temperance; his mother was a WCTU leader and his father, a Methodist minister, published The Arts of Intoxication in 1870, one year before young Stephen was born.

Crane continued his interest in the abuse of alcohol in George's Mother (1896), and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" (1898) as well as "The Blue Hotel." In "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," a parody of westerns, drinking seems to ward off the threat of feminization brought on by marriage. When drunk, Scratchy attempts to "woo" Potter away from his bride through their fraternal gunfighting ritual, which matrimony threatens to destroy. In "The Blue Hotel," Scully hides whiskey, perhaps suggesting that the hotel's blue color indicates it is a temperance inn, and the Swede's excessive drinking leads to his death.

In this exuberant poem, the poet celebrates life by converting sensual, immoral drunken imagery into ecstatic, life-affirming moments. The playful, irreverent ending suggests that even heavenly angels approve of the comic narrator who, without drinking alcohol, is drunk on life itself.

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TWAIN'S PARODY OF TEMPERANCE FICTION

Whereas Dickinson's play with temperance imagery stands in contrast to the vast majority of authors who wrote earnestly about alcohol, Mark Twain (1835–1910) viewed the anti-alcohol movement with skepticism and deliberately satirized it. For example, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Pap's drunken abuse of Huck is real and painful. But Twain spoofs the effectiveness of moral suasion in the scene where Judge Thatcher speaks to Pap about the virtues of sobriety. Seemingly moved by the judge's insistence on sobriety, Pap consequently swears the temperance pledge: "Then the old man he signed a pledge—made his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that" (p. 30). However, Twain subverts the effectiveness of moral suasion and lampoons the power of a pledge to keep drunkards away from alcohol by showing Pap getting viciously drunk only hours later: "Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room, and in the night sometime he got powerful thirsty and clumb out onto the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places" (p. 30).

Twain also satirizes a temperance meeting in Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) where members of the town's rum party invite Siamese twins, one of whom does not drink, to attend a meeting. To shouts of "Wet them down! Wet them down! Give them a drink!" (p. 68) one of the conjoined twins imbibes while the other refuses. Insults are exchanged, especially regarding the twin who abstains, and mayhem ensues.

AFRICAN AMERICAN TEMPERANCE FICTION

Black Americans linked temperance to social acceptance, believing that sobriety and self-control could open the door to economic opportunity. The white working class resented blacks who worked for lower wages. The black temperance movement, which successfully organized, motivated, and elevated its members, threatened white economic dominance even further. Frances Harper, in addition to being a prolific poet, novelist, and orator, battled racism in the WCTU, eventually serving in segregated colored chapters. She held office in the Pennsylvania WCTU in 1876 and the National Superintendent of Work among Colored People for the national WCTU by 1883. Credited with being the first published African American short story, Harper's "The Two Offers" appeared in the Anglo-African in 1859 and is a temperance tale. "The Two Offers" presents the dilemma of Laura Lagrange, an heiress who receives two requests for her hand in marriage. Her poor cousin, Janette Alston, advises Laura to refuse both men on the grounds that it is better to remain an old maid than to marry a man simply because he makes a good offer. Laura heedlessly marries a drunkard whose lack of affection drives her to an early grave. Janette prevails into old age as a single woman.

Harper is best known for her 1892 novel Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted, a novel set in the Reconstruction South that addresses racial politics and some temperance issues. But her novel Sowing and Reaping (serialized in the Christian Recorder in 1876–1877) more explicitly treats the anti-liquor cause. Heavily didactic, the novel focuses on two cousins, Belle Gordon and Jeanette Roland. Belle is courted by the wealthy Charles Romaine but refuses him because she disdains his drinking habit. Instead she marries the poorer but temperate Paul Clifford and happily works with him for the temperance cause. Jeanette marries Charles Romaine, who leads her into a life of misery and eventual widowhood because of his inebriation.

THE RISE OF MODERNISM

The turn of the century marked the rise of modernism, a genre that also accommodated themes of alcohol. In sketchy terms, modernism refers to a movement in art, architecture, and literature generally characterized by a deliberate break with previous forms of expression. Themes of alcohol and alcohol abuse reinforce such characteristics of modernist writing as postwar disillusionment, cynicism, despair, and spiritual malaise—themes that would later find expression in the works of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In Westerns, the saloon figures prominently in the daily life of colorful residents and drifters. Here, the drummer (a traveling salesman) serves as a stand-in for the reader as an outsider unfamiliar with Scratchy Wilson's ritual of getting drunk and going on a guntoting rampage. In the Weary Gentleman saloon the drinkers both find out about the danger posed by Scratchy and take refuge.

The drummer's was interrupted by a young man who suddenly appeared in the open door. He cried: "Scratchy Wilson's drunk, and has turned loose with both hands." The two Mexicans at once set down their glasses and faded out of the rear entrance of the saloon. The drummer, innocent and jocular, answered, "All right, old man. S'pose he has? Come in and have a drink, anyhow." But the information had made such an obvious cleft in every skull in the room that the drummer was obliged to see its importance. All had become instantly solemn. "Say," said he, mystified, "what is this?" . . . "It means, my friend," he answered, as he came into the saloon, "that for the next two hours this town won't be a health resort."

Crane, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," p. 396.

In John Barleycorn (1913) Jack London (1876–1916) presents the personal history of his battle with the demon rum, not unlike the way members of Alcoholics Anonymous tell their personal stories at group meetings today. By personifying malt liquor in the title of his memoir, London signals the importance of alcohol to his identity. London also writes about alcohol's influence on his literary skills and on his conception of masculinity, which often hinges on one's ability to drink great quantities. As a modern piece of writing, John Barleycorn uses alcohol to chronicle despair, express a heightened self-consciousness, and explore doubt about the capacity of language to convey truth.

The Eighteenth Amendment in favor of Prohibition was the quickest of any amendment to pass the vote, and the United States became a constitutionally dry nation as of January 1920. Individuals had to surrender their right to drink in order to benefit what was perceived to be the good of all. In John Barleycorn, London writes that he voted for women's suffrage because "When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition. . . . It is the wives, and sisters, and mothers, and they only, who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn" (p. 2). The dry victory turned out to last only thirteen years, however, for in 1933 the Twenty-first Amendment overturned the Eighteenth.

See alsoAddiction; Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; McTeague; Reform

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Crane, Stephen. The Portable Stephen Crane. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Joseph Katz. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

Gough, John B. Platform Echoes. Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington & Co., 1885.

London, Jack. John Barleycorn. 1913. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: Signet, 2002.

Twain, Mark. Pudd'nhead Wilson. 1894. New York: Signet, 1994.

Secondary Works

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820–70. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Clark, Norman H. Deliver Us from Evil. New York: Norton, 1976.

Crowley, John W. The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Writing. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Gusfield, Joseph. Symbolic Crusade. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963.

Reynolds, David S., and Debra J. Rosenthal, eds. The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Warner, Nicholas. Spirits of America: Intoxication in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

Debra J. Rosenthal