The Temperance Movement

Many moral reformers also advocated temperance. Organized temperance work began in 1826 with the founding of the American Temperance Society, an all-male organization led by clergy and businessmen who focused on alcohol abuse among working-class men. Religious revivals then inspired the establishment of some 5,000 local chapters with more than 100,000 members. Over time, the temperance movement changed the goal from moderation to total abstinence, targeted middle-class and elite as well as working-class men, and welcomed women’s support. Wives and mothers were expected to persuade family members to stop drinking, sign a temperance pledge, and commit their newly sober souls to God. To promote this work, women founded dozens of female temperance societies in the 1830s. African Americans, too, created their own temperance organizations.

Some white working men viewed temperance as a way to gain dignity and respect. For Protestants, in particular, embracing temperance distinguished them from Irish Catholic workers, who were caricatured as happy drunkards. Some working-class temperance advocates also criticized liquor dealers, whom they considered to be greedy capitalists overseeing “the vilest, meanest, most earth-cursing and hell-filling business ever followed.”

Despite the rapid growth of temperance organizations, moral suasion failed to reduce alcohol consumption significantly. As a result, many temperance advocates turned to legal reform in the 1840s, hoping to legislate where they could not persuade. In 1851 Maine passed legislation that prohibited the sale of all alcoholic beverages. By 1855 twelve states had joined Maine in restricting the manufacture or sale of alcohol. Yet these stringent measures inspired a backlash. Hostile to the imposition of middle-class Protestant standards on the population at large, Irish workers in Maine organized the Portland Rum Riot in 1855. It led to the law’s repeal the next year.

Legal strategies generally complemented rather than replaced moral arguments. Temperance advocates continued to publish short stories, magazine articles, sermons, and novels alerting Americans to the dangers of “demon rum.” Working-class families were often the subjects of didactic tales written by and for the middle class. But laboring men and women had their own ideas about how to deal with alcohol abuse. Small groups of men who abused alcohol gathered together in the 1840s and formed Washingtonian societies—named in honor of the nation’s founder—to help each other stop drinking. Martha Washington societies appeared shortly thereafter, composed not of female alcoholics but of the wives, mothers, and sisters of male alcoholics.

Temperance advocates thus used various strategies to limit alcohol abuse and its consequences. Over the course of the nineteenth century, these efforts gradually reduced the consumption of beer, wine, and spirits, although they did not eliminate the problem.