temperance definition us history

temperance definition us history

Temperance Movement in U.S. History: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to the Temperance Movement

The United States has a long history of drinking alcoholic beverages. When it was still part of the British Empire, there was a widespread consumption of beer and rum among colonial Americans. This continued in the early-nineteenth-century United States, where individuals drank an average of three times more alcohol than they do in the country today. Drinking was a staple of male culture, used for business transactions, to celebrate, and as a daily custom. However, in the early- to mid-nineteenth-century United States, a historic and powerful social movement known as the temperance movement began. Often referred to as the “first road to social control,” the temperance movement led to the eventual implementation of alcohol prohibition. The movement was varied and complex, investigating local, state, and federal involvement in reducing the amount that Americans drank. In this essay, primary and secondary historical sources will be employed to answer the essential question of this research, which is to determine whether the temperance movement was more of a moral or a political crusade in early-nineteenth-century U.S. history.

2. Key Figures and Organizations

Another pioneer was a reformed inebriate and the country’s best-known temperance leader of the next 20 years. Born in Sweden, Rush lived in the United States during the mid-1820s. Between 1828 and 1833, he published, at his own expense, The Rush Pledge, calling it the “Substance of the lectures of the Hon. J.C. Warren, M.D., and Rev. J. Marsh, on the Strong Drink Traffic.” According to its constitution, a member of the society, before stepping into line, must take an oath of “total abstinence from all that can intoxicate.” Owing to its rapid spread into other states and abroad, it was also called the “Washingtonian movement.” After publishing his pledge in Philadelphia in 1840, Rush drifted away from the reform with the founders of the Lodge. They had, he said, “forgotten their first impulses, their original designs.”

The seed of the temperance movement in the United States is usually associated with individuals rather than a collective body. Although Americans have been critical of drunkenness for at least as long as they have been allowed to drink, the first clergymen to rail against intemperance had small impact on popular attitudes or behavior. Foremost among these pioneers of the early 1800s were the Presbyterian ministers Nathaniel Taylor, Lyman Beecher, and Justin Edwards, who linked alcohol consumption to religious and moral decay. In 1826, Edwards convened the first national temperance convention in Saratoga, New York.

3. Legislation and Impact

The early temperance movement in the United States could best be described as a nonpartisan experiment in oppression. Reformers knew that local option laws had very little effect and their concerts moved to prohibition. Lawmaking was only a portion of the early reform agenda. Revivals, public meetings, and the distribution of banal literature played crucial roles in the campaign. Those who dared to ostracize from this call impeded recreational sex activities, which unlocked access of this action to public control. In their more than 80-year experiment, states and local governments used the power to restrict production and consumption in a variety of ways. The enactment of local laws was not considered suitable because of the mortality of public officers and their family members. To protect town and state political gatherings from the intemperate, anti-saloon activists agreed to taxation.

Alcohol consumption in the 19th century was reduced for a variety of reasons, including the establishment of new statutory minimum legal drinking age laws, tax and price controls, licensing laws, laws that banned open saloons, and laws prohibiting all sales of alcohol. By 1890, all U.S. states and territories had prescribed a minimum legal drinking age of at least 16, and within a decade most had increased the minimum to 18 or older, contingent upon the legal drinking age. The federal government contributed indirectly to this movement toward teen prohibition by imposing a preceding beer Excise Tax. Immoral life exploits generally overflowed government. Land and a series of state Supreme Court livelihoods effectively gave local government the power to determine who could apprehend a license and the flexibility to utilize that license without legislative directions.

Legislation and Acts

4. Cultural and Social Aspects

Analysis of the temperance movement suggests that it was neither a desperate expression of religious fanaticism – as many historians have thought – nor the product of American reality. It was rather a comprehensive response and advice to the growing number of contemporaneously spreading controversies “from the unexpected and insistent bequests of a fresh set of intellectual and emotional apostles.” Indeed, the American people needed – as much as the Americans need them today – a boost toward confidence in the basic values of life: security, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Consider the social and cultural background of that era. The industrial revolution emerged with disruptive power, reforming every aspect of life. Agricultural metropolis cities – where two cultures, often unwillingly, mixing up – became hiding places for immigrants pouring in from lands of despotism, gold mines, and beggary for those entrepreneurially minded, want or desperation for those holding a mindset opposite to these characteristics. The rest sought passing shelter. There was a lack of confidence in prevailing values and the progress of the society promised by the Founding Fathers. It was these urgencies that invigorated the reformers. But why did the reformers challenge the most aspired beliefs of freedom, tolerance, and independence embedded in the interpretation of the intellectuals led by the Tocquevillian framework? Providing an insight for this peculiar questioning is needed in order to understand the historical significance of the Temperance movement better.

Historiography often tends to give somewhat biased and inadequate interpretations to the historical events and movements. The Temperance movement is no exception to that customary paradigm. It is often said that the Temperance movement arose in the U.S. in the early American Republic as the result of the evil and injurious effects of alcoholic beverages. The advocates and activists of the movement, pursuing ostensibly noble motives, tried to suppress alcohol consumption. However, in the process of doing this, they used extremely stringent measures and created a situation where controversy supplemented controversy and conflict supplanted conflict. Consequently, this political, social, and cultural struggle was reflected in many aspects of American life. It is the status that the movement acquired in these areas of American life that needs to be addressed, not only to understand the nature of the movement itself, but also to realize the reflection of the social context of American intellect and life during the first half of the 19th century.

5. Legacy and Relevance Today

The concepts of self-control, moderation, and abstinence are not the sole property of cultural reformers or those struggling with societal concerns about potentially dangerous or addictive behaviors. However, understanding an approach toward temperate living could supply invert help dealing with a system of very complicated problems. First, inquiry of various aspects might naturalize their linkings and see special complex problems in new ways. Second, our knowledge of the past’s searches for wholesome behavior might lead to easier solutions than we are willing to take the time for today. We are not just starting to fight youth smoking or drug use, and the fact that society asks how earlier generations dealt successfully with large-scale problems might make the current answers appear more manifest or desirable and it might accept its modesty.

Today, the term “temperance” often seems dated due to its historical connection to the temperance movement that led to Prohibition in the early twentieth century. Despite its association with the past, the principles of temperance have much to offer individuals and society today. Many viewpoint associations and recent calls for temperance – often supplied in response to the persistent problems of drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling, and other potentially addictive behaviors – feel that there are lessons that were learned from the past for its present relevance. Even though some might decide differently than those cultural reformers and politicians of almost a century ago, temperance is a multi-faceted concept attached to the development of personal habits, attitudes, behavior, responsibility, and virtue. These are subjects that will always be crucial to happiness, success, and the achievement of a just and healthy society.