Temperance movement in the United States

The Temperance movement in the United States was a movement to curb the consumption of alcohol. It had a large influence on American politics and society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, various factors contributed to an epidemic of alcoholism that went hand-in-hand with spousal abuse, family neglect, and chronic unemployment. Americans used to drinking lightly alcoholic beverages like cider "from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn" began ingesting far more alcohol as they drank more of strong, cheap beverages like rum (in the colonial period) and whiskey (in the post-Revolutionary period). Popular pressure for cheap and plentiful alcohol led to relaxed ordinances on alcohol sales.

The Temperance movement sparked to life with Benjamin Rush's 1784 tract, An Inquiry Into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind, which judged the excessive use of alcohol injurious to physical and psychological health. Apparently influenced by Dr. Rush's Inquiry, about 200 farmers in a Connecticut community formed a temperance association in 1789 to ban the making of whiskey. Similar associations were formed in Virginia in 1800, and New York State in 1808. Over the next decade, other temperance organizations were formed in eight states, some being statewide organizations. The young movement advocated temperance or levelness rather than abstinence. Many leaders of the movement expanded their activities and took positions on observance of the Sabbath and other moral issues, and by the early 1820s political in-fighting had stalled the movement.

Some leaders persevered in pressing their cause forward. Americans such as Lyman Beecher, who was a Connecticut minister, had started to lecture his fellow citizens against all use of liquor in 1825. The American Temperance Society was formed in 1826 and benefited from a renewed interest in religion and morality. Within 12 years it claimed more than 8,000 local groups and over 1,500,000 members. By 1839, 18 temperance journals were being published. Simultaneously, some Protestant and Catholic church leaders were beginning to promote temperance. The movement split along two lines in the late 1830s: between moderates allowing some drinking and radicals demanding total abstinence, and between voluntarists relying on moral suasion alone and prohibitionists promoting laws to restrict or ban alcohol. Radicals and prohibitionists dominated many of the largest temperance organizations after the 1830s, and temperance eventually became synonymous with prohibition.

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