Precursors of the Prohibition Movement

His sermons were widely circulated. A stem formed in Massachusetts to follow his teachings was called the American order for the Promotion of somberness, later shorted to the American Temperance Society (Mendelson and Mello 28-29).

The American temperance Society is seen as offering a study innovation in the politics of special vex groups:

By organizing large numbers of energetic, middle-class men and women into locally base voluntary interest groups, Temperance reformers were able to raise specie and apply pressure directly on the political process. Exploiting the antecedent of the printed word, a massive propaganda campaign was initiated through the distribution of millions of sordid Temperance tracts. After a large special interest ne iirk was established, the literature of protest continued through the bill and distribution of annual reports, Temperance almanacs, special circulars, weekly newspapers, and Temperance journals (Mendelson and Mello 30-31).

The movement gained support in the 1830s and broadened its base, though it remained confined more often than not to women, the medical profession, and the clergy. The great Temperance reform of the 1830s reduced the per capita consumption of alcohol:

Consumption of both liquor and cider plunged to levels so low that by 1849 American adults were drinking 75 percentage less absolute alcohol than they had drunk just two decades before (Mendelson and Mello 33).

Many establishments selling alcohol were closed. The

Mendelson, Jack H. and Nancy K. Mello. Alcohol: Use and Abuse in America. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985.

The next stage included a new set of players. Ruth Bordin writes about the development of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s and the course taken by that organization everywhither the next three decades. Bordin's analysis depicts the roots of the imperfect movement that would culminate in the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, though the story told by Bordin stops well short of that era. What she does luff is first that the WCTU provided the basis for the women's movement that would follow and organized women in a political way that had never been achieved before.

This also demonstrates a part of the organization of that segment of the population that would support the beginning of Prohibition, and prohibition was a goal of the WCTU. The Anti-Saloon League would take over from the WCTU in the fight against alcohol after 1900 (Bordin xviii). Bordin is interested here in the history of temperance, and she notes that the era of prohibition which ended in 1933 caused a puzzle in that historians then ignored the erudition and scope of the problem Prohibition had attempted to solve; namely, the problem of alcoholism:

first success of the Temperance Movement reached its acme around 1835.

A whole generation of writers viewed temperance tempest as a frivolous interference with basic individual liberty and a preoccupation with an issue that was at scoop marginal to the real problems of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society. Historians saw the legal profession as a benign institution that served a vital social function as a poor man's inn (Bordin xiv-xv).

They refurbished the holistic antebellum view of social evils as interrelated--with dissipation at the center of most of them. Thus, these new temperance workers were persuade that their neorepublican vision of the good society could become reality plainly through a broad-
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