Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America's Public Schools, 1880-1925 (review)

Abstract

Scientific Temperance Instruction was a popular movement during the late nineteenth century to persuade schoolchildren to abstain from drinking alcoholic beverages. Led by Mary Hunt--indefatigable leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, and later of the Scientific Temperance Federation--thousands of American women campaigned for a variety of local regulations and state laws requiring instruction about the evils of the "poison," alcohol. By 1901, every state had mandated some form of scientific temperance instruction, and about half of the nation's school districts had adopted texts approved by Hunt. In this well-crafted monograph, Jonathan Zimmerman, a specialist in the history of progressivism and of American education, provides the first scholarly history of the rise and fall of STI, as it was known. He is especially interested in the interactions between expertise and lay influence in educational curricula. He has concluded that STI represented an important example of how a popular movement enlisted expert opinion on behalf of its agenda. Ironically, although Mary Hunt and the legions of women she motivated to lobby school boards and statehouses never so intended, the effect of their movement was to spark a long-running public discussion over education and the role of experts in controlling curricula.