Temperance Activists Research Articles

Liquor Rations and Labour Management in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Abstract A striking yet underexamined system of labour management circulated between land and sea in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world: the use of liquor rations to stimulate worker productivity. Turning to the British naval warship and the American slave plantation, this article depicts how labour supervisors in both settings relied on carefully regulated quantities of alcohol to extract more labour from their workforces. Even as Anglo-American temperance activists called for sobering up the working classes, many naval commanders and slaveholders held firm to the belief that managed intemperance was an essential tool for mobilizing workers. The study of liquor rations and the arguments endorsing their distribution helps to reveal how a spectrum of coercive labour practices swept through the Atlantic world amid the emergence of an industrial capitalist order. Zooming in on the history of these rations enables us to discern labour extraction strategies that operated between the poles of violent coercion and market-based exploitation, and that animated vital sectors of the Atlantic economy during the nineteenth century.

Tradition through Repetition: "The Present Crisis," Social Action, and the Literary Excerpt Genre

Abstract: This essay develops a theory of the literary excerpt, taking as a case study the ways in which James Russell Lowell's 1845 poem "The Present Crisis" has been quoted in public discourse by abolitionists, suffragists, temperance activists, anti-imperialists, and Civil Rights activists including W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. A prominent recent instance is U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black's quotation from the poem in his opening prayer for the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Tracing these and other histories of excerpting "The Present Crisis," the essay draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies to argue that the literary excerpt is a distinct paraliterary genre, a form of social action that enables two purposes: bringing literary authority to nonliterary domains and participating in a tradition through repetition. Attention to the excerpt genre's pragmatics can thus bring the question of instrumentality (back) to considerations of literariness.

Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

Reviewed by: Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone Robin C. Henry Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 212 pp. $45.00 (cloth). The examination of queer spaces in U.S. history has led to a greater understanding of the relationship between marginalized people and public space. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone’s Queering Kansas City Jazz expands this understanding, moving beyond the identification of queer space and people in the famous Missouri Midwest jazz city. Indeed, she argues that Kansas City jazz has a fluid and intersectional identity; it originated, she stresses, in brothels and working-class bars frequented by immigrants and Black people. She further argues that the relatively unknown nature of the connection between jazz and gender nonconformity can be traced to jazz histories that have systemically erased queerness and gender experimentation, including gender nonconforming dress and presentation, in jazz performances and spaces. The reclaiming of these voices, personalities, and spaces forms the heart of her project. Clifford-Napoleone’s book is divided into two parts. The first provides a history of Kansas City, focusing especially on the rise of the Pendergast family. That family not only ruled the city’s political scene, but also shaped the nightlife of saloons, clubs, and brothels in its West Bottom section. This is well-trod history, but Clifford-Napoleone shows the ways in which people of color, working-class people, and gender nonconforming people were always part of the city’s fabric. Kansas City, she explains, rested at the edge of the much-mythologized American frontier, whose diverse residents—reformers and temperance activists on the one hand and individuals who wanted to keep the city’s entertainment district as open to new acts and people as possible on the other—found space. Kansas Citians’ conflicting agendas, however, led city leaders and planners to make strategic choices that, over time, narrowed spaces for experimentation. This analysis in the section of her book lays the foundation for later chapters by emphasizing [End Page 169] that these happenings were choices, not inevitabilities. As the city developed, discordant messages caused conflict over whose city and whose jazz and entertainment scene it really was. At every turn, marginalized people, especially those who experimented with gender, lost their connection to and place within jazz. It is Clifford-Napoleone’s presentation of this conflict within the oft-told history of Kansas City that reminds readers that the city’s origin stories did not conform to a standard rhythm. Rather, they resembled the experiments in syncopated time that made the city’s music so famous. Clifford-Napoleone’s argument develops most fully and her major contribution is most clear in the second half of her book. She examines two tracks: first, the historical record and, second, how that record was created. In her analysis, the historical record continues to show more evidence of queerness in the jazz scene than previous historians of jazz and of Kansas City have identified. It is here that Clifford-Napoleone’s work truly moves into new spaces. For her, queerness is not limited to same-sex acts or homosexual identifications. Instead, she opens up queerness to also encompass race and class identities that lie beyond White middle-class norms, as well as to include nonconforming professions, such as prostitution. The result is a portrait of Kansas City’s jazz scene that is truly intersectional and much queerer than previously known. In Clifford-Napoleone’s study, that scene becomes a space where understandings of gender experimentation, class, and race cannot be separated from one another or removed from the whole. Throughout the book’s second section, Clifford-Napoleone points out that much of this intersectional, queer space is not only neglected in standard jazz and Kansas City histories but also missing in jazz archives. She argues that the process of collecting some types of archival material but not others has effectively erased the existence of queer performers and places. The former include Mr. Half and Half; the latter include Dante’s Inferno and the Paradise Club. Possibly worse, Clifford...

Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard, by Thora Hands

Reviewed by: Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard by Thora Hands Lacey Sparks (bio) Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard, by Thora Hands; pp. xiv + 195. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, £26.90, $31.00, and free as an eBook at springer.com. For every working-class drunkard stumbling down Gin Lane, and for every corresponding middle-class temperance activist trying to save him, millions of unremarkable, moderate drinkers toasted another evening to each other’s health. Thora Hands’s Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard interrogates the habits of those ordinary drinkers, finding the power and meaning of their rituals and embedding their practices in a heady brew of social, economic, political, and medical contexts. A social history, Drinking also contains elements of the history of food and drink, medicine, drugs, gender, and empire by turns. Ideal in particular for an undergraduate audience, a free eBook on an enjoyable topic, written in Hands’s clear, direct prose, can serve as a gateway drug to more in-depth studies of Victorian history and culture. Fundamentally, according to Hands, “[h]istory has shown that it does not matter how often or to what extent alcohol consumption has been problematized or prohibited—people still continue to drink. Therefore, the key to understanding drinking behavior is to try and understand why people drink” (2). To that end, she draws on other social and cultural histories of alcohol, undergirding her analysis with frameworks from [End Page 695] theorists such as Pierre Bordieu and Michel de Certeau. Deftly maintaining her analytical legibility, she uses their theories with a light touch to situate the intersections of consumption and everyday life within their broader contexts, sometimes upholding and sometimes challenging the status quo. As Hands convincingly illustrates, alcohol consumers were rational actors; at the same time, their actions were influenced, often explicitly, by broad, deep contexts, from medical discourse to popular culture to advertisements. Hands begins at the endpoint of Brian Harrison’s Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (1997), an analysis of the nineteenth-century temperance movement until 1872, which she identifies as a pivot-point in the global drink trade, a lucrative enterprise expanding so rapidly that profits tempered the temperance movement. Hands’s most significant scholarly contribution is her reframing of Victorian and Edwardian histories of drink to encompass all drinkers rather than reproducing the nineteenth-century fixation on alcohol abuse. Hands centrally argues that Victorian and Edwardian intoxication existed along a continuum of behaviors and motivations for drinking. The choice of what, where, and how much to drink lay at the center of a dense web of social and cultural forces. Hands skillfully captures the fundamental tension at the core of her narrative, which came to a head when an anti-drink temperance movement based on morality met a pro-drink movement based on laissez-faire principles, encompassing both drink merchants’ freedom of trade—on an industrialized, global scale—and consumers’ freedom of choice. Late-Victorian attitudes toward drink distilled into the desire for both the liberal freedom to drink and the moral judgment not to exercise that freedom. In representing this context, Hands organizes the book into three parts, and in the first section, “Drinkers,” she examines the political discourse surrounding drinking and drunkenness, mining parliamentary enquiries from the mid-to-late nineteenth century. She argues that these testimonies uncovered a range of drinking behaviors that varied according to “social class, gender, occupation, ethnicity and regional location” (11). Drawing on testimony including crime statistics, doctors’ interviews, and data from analytical chemists, parliamentarians increasingly realized that the working class drank because poverty conditions made them miserable. These enquiries further revealed that members of Parliament could conceive of a working-class man rationally exercising his right to drink in moderation in a pub; however, the quiet menace of the unfeminine working-class woman secretly drinking to excess continued to perpetuate sexist double standards of behavior. The second section, “Drinks,” provides three case studies for the marketing and selling of beer, spirits, and wine in the late-nineteenth century: beer...

The Problem of Alcohol in Colonial India (c. 1907–1942)

This article traces the transformation of liquor and industrial alcohol into a commercial product in twentieth-century colonial India. Liquor (alcoholic beverages for human consumption) remained prominent in political discourse and in the public sphere in this period. Temperance activists, Gandhian nationalists and medical authorities critiqued government revenue extraction from consumable liquors and advocated either partial or total prohibition. On the other hand, industrial alcohol emerged as an unchallenged and untampered commodity while it became essential to Indian industrialization, a process that accelerated between the wars. This article moves beyond cultural explanations of transformation of commodities and instead focuses on the temporal and political lives of liquor and alcohol in colonial India.

Pubs and Patriots: The Drink Crisis in Britain during World War One by Robert Duncan

Reviewed by: Pubs and Patriots: The Drink Crisis in Britain during World War One by Robert Duncan Peter Hynd Duncan, Robert– Pubs and Patriots: The Drink Crisis in Britain during World War One. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Pp. 262 Robert Duncan’s Pubs and Patriots is the story of the Central Control Board (CCB), a government body formed during the First World War with the aim of radically overhauling the regulation of alcohol in Great Britain. Despite being the first, and to date most comprehensive attempt by the British state to reform the relationship between Britons and alcohol, remarkably little has been written about the CCB since shortly after its demise in 1921. Pubs and Patriots is the first monograph to focus on the history of the CCB, and it is a success. Pubs and Patriots opens with a chapter length overview of the temperance movement and the so-called ‘drink problem’ in Great Britain, circa 1870-1914. [End Page 203] Here Duncan persuasively argues that the drink problem was “as much about class and perceptions of behaviour as about drink itself” (p. 8) and that “The true impact of the pre-war drink debate can only truly be appreciated when one considers the type of arguments that emerged concerning alcohol when the war began.” (p. 38) This is a strong setup for the two chapters that follow, which outline the emergence of the drink problem as a perceived threat to national efficiency in the context of an increasingly desperate war, and Lloyd George’s push for the creation of the Central Control Board in early 1915. Although properly skeptical of contemporary claims that drunkenness—generally seen as a working class problem—presented a real threat to the war effort in the form of wasted manpower and lost work hours, Duncan argues that “The war gave pro-temperance Liberals the excuse they had been seeking for decades” to begin a comprehensive programme of radical temperance reforms. (p. 10) The Central Control Board, comprised of prominent temperance activists, socialists, and large employers from across the political spectrum, was founded in May 1915 to direct these reforms. The middle chapters of Pubs and Patriots outline the exact nature of the reforms attempted by the CCB. These ranged from relatively uncontroversial (and enduring) measures such as increasing the price of drink through taxation and restricting the opening hours of public houses, to the radical ‘Carlisle Experiment’ in which all of that city’s breweries and public houses were nationalized. The strength of these chapters lies in Duncan’s nuanced analysis of the arguments of both supporters and opponents (official and unofficial) of each of these measures. It is to Duncan’s credit that he can offer satisfying and fair explanations for ideas he clearly finds distasteful without compromising one of Pubs and Patriot’s main arguments: that the reforms pushed by the CCB were ultimately motivated by unfair class prejudices that assumed working class people could not be trusted to control their own alcohol consumption. The book’s final chapter details the demise of the Central Control Board in the years after the end of the war. The postwar CCB was, Duncan argues, a victim of its own wartime rhetoric: “People could not see why restrictions had to continue as the war had been fought to preserve the British way of life, not to create a land of restriction and sobriety propagated by temperance faddists.” (p. 223) State intervention in the drink trade could be justified by the unique demands of wartime, but interventionist policies became an easy target once the war was over. Here Duncan also argues that the temperance movement as a whole was rendered politically irrelevant by the experience of the war and the experiments of the CCB. Moderate reforms to the public house and the drink trade had proven effective, but many of the more radical experiments were onerous and unpopular. In the wake of the CCB, prohibition, seen as the ultimate goal of temperance activists, could be easily dismissed as impractical fantasy. Both the depth and breadth of Duncan’s historical research is commendable. In addition to clever and careful use of the archive produced by...

A Picture of Piety: The Remaking of Mary Dyer as a True Woman in Arthur’s Home Magazine

A Picture of Piety:The Remaking of Mary Dyer as a True Woman in Arthur’s Home Magazine Stella Setka (bio) As feminist critics Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Barbara Welter have noted, there was a significant shift from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century regarding the way in which women’s social and domestic roles were defined.1 In Good Wives, a study of seventeenth-century role definition, Ulrich suggests that while early New England women were certainly subservient to men, they could exercise agency within the framework of several distinct roles: housewife, deputy husband, consort, mother, mistress, neighbor, Christian, and, when circumstances demanded, heroine.2 These duties, however “discrete,” still allowed women a certain degree of agency and independence that was challenged significantly in the nineteenth century.3 By that time, feminine agency operated almost exclusively within the confines of the private sphere, and the roles associated with seventeenth-century women were distilled into what Barbara Welter identifies in her seminal essay “The Cult of True Womanhood” as “four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.”4 As a result, nineteenth-century historians and writers who sought to resurrect seventeenth-century women as archetypes of American womanhood—and to do so in a way that aroused reader sympathy—had to mythologize these women in terms of the ideal nineteenth-century American woman.5 The most popular outlet for such mythmaking was the women’s journal. Just as magazines like Cosmopolitan and Vogue today inform women of the latest trends in fashion, literature, and social mores, so too did popular women’s periodicals of the nineteenth century prescribe for their readers the parameters of femininity and womanhood. Immensely successful women’s magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, Arthur’s Home Magazine, and Peterson’s Magazine were committed to defining the nature and role of women, both in society and in the home.6 Further, although men tended to own and manage these journals, [End Page 61] women actively shaped the conservative content of the magazines by writing editorials, short stories, and poems.7 As Amy Aronson notes, “the effort to define and realize ‘the women’s sphere’ was a consistent topic in the popular women’s magazines of the 1850s.”8 Indeed, such journals sought to provide their readers with models of wifely comportment and motherhood and offered melodramatic examples of the consequences of failing in these endeavors. Although most women’s periodicals of the day appealed to a mainstream Christian audience, Arthur’s Home Magazine—owned by the prolific writer and temperance activist Timothy Shay Arthur—aligned its advocacy of mainstream conceptions of the True Woman with Quaker and Swedenborgian sensibilities, beliefs that, as Natasha Kraus argues, “further consolidated the web of social meanings embedding True Womanhood.”9 This article analyzes the ways in which Martha Allen, a Quaker and regular contributor to Arthur’s Home Magazine, worked to resuscitate, through a series of articles, the seventeenth-century Quaker martyr Mary Dyer as a prototype for the True Woman. Although generally overlooked by scholars of early American history and overshadowed in American letters by her more infamous contemporary Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer nonetheless emerged in one of the leading women’s periodicals of the nineteenth century as a model of the pious True Woman. Turning our attention to the representation of Mary Dyer in the nineteenth century is long overdue, not only because it sheds light on the long-lasting impact of the Antinomian and Quaker controversies of the seventeenth century, but also because it reflects the efforts of nineteenth-century periodicals to locate in America’s early history the roots of True Womanhood. By focusing specifically on the writings of Martha Allen as a case study, I trace the process by which a seventeenth-century Quaker martyr was refashioned as an arbiter of nineteenth-century American womanhood.10 Mary Dyer, Quaker Martyr The project of myth-making with which writers like Martha Allen were involved was not unusual for its time. As America entered the nineteenth century, it was a fledging state struggling to form its own identity, based on the principles of democracy and freedom upon which it was founded. To some degree, America...

Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition by Marni Davis (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition by Marni Davis David Nasaw (bio) Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition. By Marni Davis. New York: New York University Press, 2012. xx + 262262 pp. Like so many other monographs that treat of immigrant history, Jews and Booze (a great, great title) focuses on the process, pace, promise, and [End Page 325] perils of assimilation and acculturation, of becoming American without abandoning Judaism. The strength of this book is the path the author clears through this this well-plowed ground. Marni Davis focuses her attention on those Jews who worked in the alcohol industry, as manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers. Many who took up the trade in the New World, she tells us, had learned and practiced it in the Old, as winemakers and saloon keepers. In cities and towns large and small across the nation, newly immigrated Jews not only made a living in the alcohol trades, but also established for themselves, their families, and the Jews who worked for them a respected place within the business community. As Davis writes, "For Jews who hoped to be accepted as citizens of their cities and towns and to be incorporated into national life more largely, Jewish whiskeymen were among the vanguard, helping to forge a path towards admission into American society" (33). Unfortunately, almost ironically, the alcohol industry, though prosperous and growing through the nineteenth century, was under attack by a small but active group of temperance activists. The Jews in the trade protested against any and all attempts at prohibition, not only because it threatened their livelihoods, but because they believed restrictions on commerce in and consumption of alcohol were profoundly un-American. The most dangerous elements of the temperance movement, they feared, were its evangelical fervor, its identification with an outspoken, activist faction of the Christian community, and its clearly stated aim to deploy temperance as a step towards "Christianizing" American life. The tension between Jews inside and outside the liquor trade and the temperance movement took many forms. Jews were targeted in the south for selling liquor to "Negroes" who, it was claimed, were genetically incapable of tolerating it. When Prohibition became the law of the land, the criticism of Jews in the trade took a new and decided nasty turn. Jews were singled out, not entirely incorrectly, for the major role they played as bootleggers, as gangsters, as un-American opponents of law and order. The position of the Jewish community was further complicated and compromised by the special dispensation given Jews in Section 6 of the Volstead Act to make, sell, and drink "sacramental wine for religious purposes." This dispensation "emerged early in the Prohibition era as a massive breach through which . . . illegal alcohol flowed. The fact that Jewish alcohol production, purveyance, and consumption was actually built into federal Prohibition law had a profound effect on Jewish attitudes toward Prohibition, and on prohibitionists' attitudes toward Jews" (141). Jews and Booze is an important book for many reasons. It opens up a somewhat neglected area of research, Jewish entrepreneurs and small [End Page 326] businessmen; it interrogates and compares the relationship of Jews to the alcohol industry in eastern Europe as well as in the United States; it focuses attention on Jewish businessmen in small towns and cities; and it is written in such a manner that it should appeal to general readers beyond the academic community. If I have a quibble with the author, it is that she too often makes too much of too little. Davis is correct to draw our attention to the anti-Semitic tracts, pamphlets, and articles that blamed the Jewish "liquor power," "whiskey trusts," and bootleggers for their crimes against humanity and the nation, but she may be overstating the prevalence and overall significance of such attacks. Still, this is a minor quibble about a book that is as enjoyable to read as it is informative. David Nasaw CUNY Graduate Center David Nasaw David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of several books, including, most recently, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times...

Better than an Ironclad: Leonard Isitt, Temperance and Greater Britain

The English-born New Zealand temperance activist, the Rev. Leonard M. Isitt, undertook a number of temperance ‘missions’ in Britain between 1895 and 1905, offering historians a deeper insight into the lived reality of the ‘British world’ and ‘Greater British’ identity. Addressing several areas of imperial historiography, the article uses newspapers from both New Zealand and Britain to acquire a truly ‘Greater British’ perspective of an imperially mobile individual, from which can be drawn lessons about imperial identities and ‘networks’. Isitt's participation in a self-consciously imperial temperance movement highlights the development of a New Zealand identity that depended upon both contrast and commonality with Britain, but it also points to a politics of imperial peregrination, with the temperance reformer's visits to the ‘Mother Country’ factoring in the highly divisive drink question in both New Zealand and Britain. The article concludes with reflections on the nature and limitations of a ‘Greater British’ politics.

Parading Protest: Orange Parades in Northern Ireland and Temperance Parades in Antebellum America

We present a comparison of two cases of ‘parading protest’ that share roots in a long Anglo-European tradition but unfolded in very different political and social contexts. Both Orangemen in Northern Ireland and Washingtonian temperance activists in the United States made strategic and contentious use of the power of socially-approved meanings attached to parading. These different cases of parading turned to protest as elements of the ceremonial parade were appropriated by working-class groups to challenge authorities and rally others to the cause. We argue that the centrality of symbols and ritual in social movement, their polysemous character, the authority associated with them, and the social psychological processes through which they operate help explain how parades may be appropriated for both orthodox and insurgent purposes.

From the Periodical Archives: Susan Warner's "How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism?"

After January 1851 release of her first and most popular novel, Susan Warner (known by her pen name, Eliz abeth Wetherell) spent rest of her literaiy career being identified as the author of The Wide, Wide World. Her literaiy career before this in cluded just one published piece: an essay in Ladies' Wreath for De cember of 1850 by an Elizabeth Witherell, an early version of her future pseudonym, entitled How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism? This essay and circumstances surrounding its appearance provide an important context for understanding Warner's aspirations as a female literary professional, her excessive concern with personal anonymity, and personal goals that would shape her texts and guide her literary career. The Ladies' Wreath was founded in 1846 as a monthly women's magazine. Between 1846 and 1851, Wreath was published prima rily by New York firm of Martyn & Ely (though magazine would circulate among multiple publishers during its years in print) and ed ited by Sarah Towne Smith Martyn. a Congregationalist, temperance activist, and prolific author of religious pamphlets for American Tract Society. Martyn retired from her reform work to edit monthly and continued in this role until 1852, when editorship passed to Helen Dodge Irving, her co-editor of several years.1 The Wreath, with an annual subscription cost of one dollar, boasted of its very healthy circulation of 25,000 in its 1851 subscription renewal notice to its readers. Each issue was thirty-six pages long and contained several colored illustrations, samples of sheet music, and a collection of varied written pieces, over half of which were attributed. Individual volumes of magazine were also republished at end of year as Ladies' Wreath: An Illustrated Annual by J. M. Fletcher & Co, and with magazine's miscellaneous contents and emphasis on fine illustra

Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement (review)

Reviewed by: Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement Jane Donovan Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement. By Joe L. Coker. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. x, 301.) The American South sacrificed more than a quarter of a million young men and its economic system ostensibly to preserve the rights of states and individuals. The region's post-Civil War movement to prohibit the use of alcohol would seem, under those circumstances, an abrupt about-face. Joe L. Coker addresses this paradox in Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement. He successfully argues that the apparent ideological inconsistency was instead a triumph of southern culture, evangelical religion, and, ultimately, racism. Coker notes that the temperance cause was weak south of the Mason Dixon line until the late stages of Reconstruction. Previous scholars tied this perceived weakness to southern fears of the alliance between temperance activists and abolitionists in the North. Coker, however, insists that antebellum temperance activity was unnecessary in the South because its "highly prized code of honor gave liquor a prominent role" (25). Further, before the war, the consumption of alcoholic beverages was a privilege reserved almost entirely for white men. Strong drink was largely unavailable to slaves, thus slave consumption was no threat to the social order. [End Page 119] As Bourbon Democrats regained control of southern politics, after 1880, prohibition became a tool for controlling African Americans, and, eventually, an aid in their disenfranchisement. Among the temperate, it seemed that a lack of black support for prohibition signaled that those who profited from the liquor trade were bribing black voters to support their cause. Alcohol consumption became a key element in the "rape narrative," the classic excuse for lynching an African American man who, by glimpse or word or unlucky location, was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. The deadly combination of "liquor, lust and lynching" (158) played into the hands of would-be prohibitionists. Tying liquor to the allegedly declining morals of black men gained plenty of white votes from evangelical Christians who could hide their racism behind the righteous cause of prohibition. Coker's well-written work is strongest on race issues and the political maneuverings of Bourbon Democrats. He recognizes evangelical Christianity's ability to adapt its anti-alcohol message to southern culture as the first steps toward its prominent influence on electoral politics in the late twentieth century. The book has two significant weaknesses. First, Coker assumes that temperance in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia is representative of the whole South. As he points out, the three states each had both rural non-slave and plantation economic sectors, but the reader questions whether his arguments would hold true in the Upper South and Florida. Second, despite his correct identification of Baptists and Methodists with southern evangelicalism, Coker betrays a lack of understanding of Methodism, especially Methodist polity. He also misidentifies Methodist founder John Wesley and is unfamiliar with the movement from Methodism's initial limited acceptance of alcohol for medicinal and digestive purposes to its strong support for temperance by the early nineteenth century, when monetary collections from Fourth of July sermons around the nation were dedicated to the anti-alcohol cause. Coker's book is an all-too-familiar tale of a Christianity polarized by arguments about what constitutes moral behavior. The church's nineteenth century crusade against alcohol consumption has much in common with the current anti-abortion and anti-gay and lesbian debates driven by conservative evangelicals. Partisans on both sides of those battles would do well to consult Coker's work. Their tactics run distinctly parallel to those of their prohibitionist ancestors. [End Page 120] Jane Donovan West Virginia University Copyright © 2008 West Virginia University Press

Temperance and the 1895 General Election in the Constituency of Derby: Midland History Prize Essay 2007

The 1895 General Election was a disastrous defeat for the Liberals with the number of seats they held in the House of Commons falling from 272 to 177. No defeat during the election was more shocking than that of Sir William Harcourt, leader of the Liberals in the House of Commons and chancellor of the exchequer. Harcourt's defeat was overwhelmingly blamed by contemporaries, and subsequently by historians, on his support for temperance legislation. This was specifically a piece of legislation called the Local Option which would have allowed for local prohibition. This local study of the election campaign in Derby uses the local press to reconstruct the narrative of the campaign that was fought in the city. The electoral battle fought between temperance activists and the brewing interests was an important feature of the campaign. However, the limitations of the franchise, the poor economic conditions and the strength of the Unionist campaign proved to be just as important in the eventual defeat of Harcourt.

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (review)

Reviewed by: Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City Brian Donovan Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. By Michael Lerner. Boston: Harvard University Press. 2007. Michael Lerner's Dry Manhattan deftly connects the political history of prohibition with the personalities who supported and disparaged the Dry cause. Lerner tells a familiar story of prohibition's unintended consequences, tracing the arc of New York City prohibition history from the Anti-Saloon League (the first modern political action committee) to the repeal in the early 1930's. Temperance activists faced an uphill battle in Tammany Hall's New York City, but the relentless lobbying of William Anderson created a political opening for New York prohibition. Pro-prohibition forces, giddy with their defeat of Tammany Hall, failed to anticipate the enormous difficulty in enforcing a ban on liquor. Chronically underpaid prohibition agents and police made lucrative arrangements within the city's underground alcohol economy, and they quickly began to resemble the bootleggers and racketeers they were entrusted to stop. Lerner details the failed attempts by Albany lawmakers and city leaders to stem illegal drinking and liquor sales. A plan to padlock offending speakeasies pushed the liquor traffickers to be more resourceful. The Mullan-Gage Law increased penalties for Volstead Act violations, but it clogged the court docket and angered the New York judiciary. Although the law empowered police to pursue violators of prohibition, it drained their resources and caused them to lose further public credibility. Instead portraying the history of prohibition as a grand fight between Wets and Drys Lerner carefully depicts different players at cross-cutting purposes. The strongest chapters in the book document the shifting cultural climate of prohibition. Lerner's discussion of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, friends and writers who took their first drink after the passage of national prohibition, highlights the larger cultural contradiction created by prohibition. Benchley became a fixture at popular New York speakeasies, while Parker threw famous cocktail parties at the Algonquin Hotel with Irving Berlin and Tallulah Bankhead. The illegality surrounding the drinking culture of New York City conferred classiness to it, and drinking became a mark of social status in 1920's Manhattan. Pre-prohibition drinking holes lacked urban sophistication, but post-prohibition nightclubs defined it. Lerner is masterful in describing prohibition's cultural blowback. New York's prohibition years overlapped with a rapidly changing social environment for women and African Americans. Dry Manhattan acknowledges the role of women's groups in fomenting temperance activism, but thoroughly demonstrates that New York women represented a range of opinion on the liquor question. From Texas Guinan, the brash hostess who made thousands of dollars defying state liquor laws at her midtown nightclubs, to the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, women's opposition to prohibition marked their sophistication as much as bobbed hair and jazz. Prohibition also affected the city's racial politics. In Harlem, prohibition intersected with the politics of respectability; so-called Black Victorians blamed their community for the failure of prohibition, while others noted collusion between white supremacist ideology and temperance activism. By the end of the decade, whites managed to wrest financial control over Harlem nightlife, and some establishments, like The Plantation Club, catered to racist fantasies with slave-era decorations and "mammy" hostesses. Chapters on the anti-immigrant impulses in the prohibition movement, women's involvement in temperance and prohibition, and a chapter on rent parties and the "Hooch Joints in Harlem" are the liveliest in Dry Manhattan, but they also underscore a weakness in the book's organization. Dry Manhattan is comprehensive, but I would have [End Page 164] liked Lerner to step back from his narrative to comment on the linkages among race, class, gender, immigration, and New York politics instead of sequestering these topics in separate chapters. Overall, Dry Manhattan stands as an important contribution to the study of early 20th century American culture, and Lerner's book should find an eager readership among students of American history, political science, American studies, and sociology. Brian Donovan University of Kansas Copyright © 2009 Mid-America American Studies Association

Sowing Seeds in an Untilled Field: Temperance and Race, Indeterminacy and Recovery in Frances E. W. Harper's Sowing and Reaping

[Woman's] individuality must be recognized before the evils of intemperance can cease to exist. How absurd the idea--how degrading the idea that woman, before marriage, can enjoy freedom of thought; but afterward that she must endorse her husband's sentiments, be they good or bad. Call you not this slavery? Amelia Bloomer In an 1853 speech to temperance proponents in New York's Metropolitan Hall, Amelia Bloomer directly connected women's temperance mission to female subordination. (1) Authors often equated intemperance and women's oppression with slavery without recognizing how disingenuous such symbolic comparisons were. Of course, the realities of slavery in the South and nominal freedom in the North belied such equations. troubled relationship between the mainstream temperance movement and African Americans--illustrated by temperance rhetoric and antislavery discourse--occasioned responses by African American writers who had multiple approaches to race-ing temperance. (2) They displayed innovative means by which race, whether foregrounded or situated as subtext, always already operated as a social factor. Because of the prolific racial pejoratives found in mainstream temperance rhetoric, African Americans had to counter these images while simultaneously engaging in temperance activism. Black-authored temperance literature often presented an alternative anti-drink paradigm in which the drunkard's race was either explicitly white or so ambiguous as to destabilize racial categories altogether. Frances E. W. Harper's Sowing and Reaping and another serialized novel, A Tale of New England Life, demonstrate one way that racial identification functioned, for each uses racially indeterminate characters and historical figures from outside the purview of the novel as a way of enhancing the text for various readerships. In this manner, these tales offer textual interrogations of race and racial categories while examining larger social issues of women's liberation and anti-drink reform. approach to temperance reform or writing in these texts is significant because it opens up what might otherwise be narrowly understood as domestic temperance novels without any relation to larger racial and gender politics. Although the author of A Tale of New England Life is unknown, because of textual similarities that include this particular strategic method, I speculate that the author could be Harper. Whether or not we can confirm this to be the case, Harper's existing work offers an example that scholars of nineteenth-century African American women's writings can use to evaluate, understand, and identify newly recovered works first published during the period. In this essay, I will explore the intersections of racial discourse and temperance rhetoric in Sowing and Reaping and A Tale of New England Life, as well as the challenges literary historians and critics face in recovering texts with racial and authorial ambiguities. In the antebellum period, many African American reformers regarded temperance commitment as a necessary component of antislavery advocacy. Although in 1843 William Lloyd Garrison proclaimed, The temperance and abolition enterprises are the hope of our country, identical in principle, based on the same broad foundation of human brotherhood, and animated by the same spirit of Christian benevolence and charity (qtd. in Hamilton 259), many white temperance activists failed to connect the two enterprises--failed to join human equality, freedom, and self-determination as the foundation of their temperance agenda and the inspiration of their abolitionist work. In fact, Frederick Douglass was strongly criticized by white American temperance delegates at the 1846 World's Temperance Convention in London for speaking out against slavery. (3) Without disregarding certain racist and pro-slavery factions in the temperance movement, Douglass identified the relation between the degradation of enslavement and intemperance--between the freedom of self-control denied by slavery and the loss of self-control caused by drunkenness. …

Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-Century America Lois Brown Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-Century America. By Elizabeth Elkin Grammer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 211 pp. $45.00. Some Wild Visions, by Elizabeth Elkin Grammer, is an insightful consideration of seven nineteenth-century female itinerant evangelists and their purposeful and strategically deployed memoirs. Grammer offers an insistently literary assessment, rather than historical analysis, of autobiographies by free and formerly enslaved women, abolitionist and temperance activists, mid-westerners, and a Canadian native. Over the course of four chapters, Grammer discusses Zilpha Elaw, an aspiring teacher in the segregated schools of Burlington, New Jersey; Julia Foote, a New York native and future elder in the A.M.E. Zion Church; Laura Smith Haviland, a Canadian Quaker abolitionist, mother of eight, and founder of the Oberlin College-inspired River Raisin Institute; Jarena Lee, whose memoir is the earliest known extant personal narrative by an African American woman; Lydia Sexton, a white New Jersey woman who promised God that she would preach if he would save the life of her sick child; Amanda Berry Smith, a highly successful evangelist, temperance activist, and children's advocate who attained international outreach in India, Africa, and throughout the United Kingdom; and Nancy Towle, a white New Hampshire native whose evangelical career included missions to preach in Canada, England, and Ireland. Some Wild Visions is primarily concerned with the evolution of itinerant women as writers and historians and the creation of an empowering and assertive evangelical autobiography. Grammer, whose study builds on the foundational work of William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and others, proposes that these life stories are provocative emancipatory texts that testify to the grueling life of an itinerant even as they achieve "textual revenge" against those who attempt to thwart their missions (37). Grammer makes a potentially poignant point when she proposes that these highly constructed narratives reflect the writers' awareness of their social alienation. It is clear, however, that these authors have created masterful life accounts that illuminate the limitations of the private sphere, justify a woman's departure from primary social relations and kinship ties, and accommodate the autonomy of unconventional women of faith. Grammer, whose deft phrasings and understated sense of irony and humor invigorate the [End Page 77] book, insists on the social realities that shape the autobiographies and her own critical mission. In an absorbing discussion about the strategic rhetorical moves and generic innovations employed by the evangelists, she offers a persuasive argument about the "gender of genre" (134). She proposes that male itinerant and well-known secular autobiographies were fueled by a sense of patriarchal authority, eminence, and the "rhetoric of success" (86). According to Grammer, the female autobiographical narrative of salvation could not benefit from such elements. If itinerant women writers embraced "their culture's idealization of productivity and competitive individualism, and its belief in quantification as a reliable measure of success," writes Grammer, then a "constant resort to merely statistical measures of evangelical success ... inevitably obscured the individual aspect in the drama of salvation" (86). Grammer recognizes the high emotional stakes involved in writing and publishing such memoirs, but argues that these texts are part of a complicated spiritual warfare. The autobiographies were weapons that "enabled [women writers] once again to seize a pulpit, to reinterrupt the dominant discourses that denied them a place and a voice outside domesticity" (40). In addition, when evangelists like Julia Foote employed biblical typology, they "engag[ed] in competitive marginality" and demonstrated forcefully their martyrdom (108). Grammer also notes that in order to "perform itinerancy," the memoirs depend on parataxis and are marked for their abandonment of traditional structural narrative devices. The sometimes desperate non-stop accounts of the wandering life prompt Grammer to consider that the evangelists have successfully created "a new sort of narrator, the autobiographer alienated from her own life story, which is left to tell itself without benefit of her ordering intelligence" (113). Indeed, it is a premise such as this that speaks to the delicate and simultaneously aggressive division of body and soul upon which the nineteenth-century female itinerant evangelist...

Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787-1886 (review)

Reviewed by: Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 Susan Mumm (bio) Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886, by M. J. D. Roberts; pp. xiii + 321. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories 2. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, £45.00, $75.00. This is an extremely fine and thoughtful book, based on an impressive range of sources; it is also demanding and densely written. It won the Royal Historical Society's 2005 Whitfield prize for the best first book on British history, and it shares a family resemblance to many first books by gifted historians. It is bursting with ideas and information, based on a colossal amount of reading and research. The style is highly condensed: in some parts of the book almost any paragraph could be taken at random and expanded into a journal article. While the style is not always easy reading, the language is accessible and jargon is minimized. Victorianists will find the second half of the book livelier than the first, as the author moves into the far more varied reform movements of that era. The narrative is organized chronologically. Roberts sets out to establish a character for each period, linking the nature of charitable organization to the dominant anxieties of the time. He charts the rise and decline of societies for the suppression of manners, and then addresses anti-slavery, temperance, Sabbath observance, and other causes attractive to moral reformers. The book describes how anxieties about moral decline waxed and waned, and the ways in which crises of confidence in the national destiny shaped voluntary associations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Roberts shifts from movements propelled by anxieties about national safety during the French wars to the burst of legislative social shaping from 1829–34, the confident activism of the 1840s and 1850s, and the post-1867 reevaluation of the moral role of the enlarged state. His stated purposes are to establish the chronology of moral reform organizations; to contextualize select initiatives; and to integrate the causes into an understanding of "moral reform as a diverse but distinctive mode of thought and action" (viii). Roberts depicts the two goals of moral reform societies in the period as a desire to change moral values and to modify behaviour, but he suggests three overarching explanatory devices into which these goals can be fitted. These are moral reform as "either the knowing or [End Page 188] involuntary articulators of the new standards of labour discipline" (4); as the history of conflict "successfully mediated or resolved," also known as the stability-explaining perspective; and as a key factor in the emergence of civil society (11). The book is also a cultural history of the charity-organizing classes, especially the commercial and professional middle class, who struggled with mixed feelings about the development of a market-oriented society (viii). "Middle class society depended...on being able to recognize a limit to the legitimate operation of market forces and to patrol that limit—on behalf of all classes" (293). Roberts, however, moves far beyond the stereotyped and largely discredited view of moral reform movements as an oppressive form of middle-class social control. He rightly points out that most societies could not have survived if their membership and support had not expanded downward. He argues that with all its vagaries and failings, voluntary effort eased the rural-urban transition, and provided openings for energetic individuals. "As the nineteenth century unfolded, this gave an opportunity for some working people to transform themselves (as temperance activists did) from being the objects of moral reform to being its practitioners" (294). Moral reform associations are depicted as making a significant contribution to the creation of a society where issues could be debated without violence and where individuals felt far from powerless; believing that by joining and founding voluntary organizations aimed at moral improvement, they could effect positive change in their society. Roberts is clearly influenced by Jürgen Habermas's thinking about the emergence of the preconditions necessary for social trust, which the book links to the history of voluntary associations. Among Roberts's many contributions is his sketch...

The “Washingtonian revival”: Narrative and the moral transformation of temperance reform in Antebellum America

This essay examines the role of movement narratives during a brief but decisive phase in the nineteenth‐century temperance movement known as the “Washingtonian Revival.” It argues that efforts to combat intemperance in the Early Republic were hampered initially by the failure of temperance activists to articulate a moral rationale that could inspire reformers, win converts to their cause, and capture the sympathies of a public swept up in the democratic and humanitarian optimism of the age. However, in the spring of 1840, a small group of reformed drunkards, calling themselves the “Washington Temperance Society,” offered to share their personal stories of redemption from drink, and so introduced into the movement a narrative that contained a compelling moral rationale for temperance reform. A burgeoning class of Washingtonian orators soon generated a “moving tide of discourse” that helped to transform the fortunes and legacy of the temperance movement. This study of the Washingtonian Revival illumines the historical and rhetorical conditions under which movement narratives may transform the moral rationale of social movements and, in so doing, alter both their form and fate.