Temperance Reform Research Articles

An Artificial Appetite: The Nineteenth-Century Struggle to Define Habitual Drunkenness

summary: After discovering in 1811 that alcohol existed as a discrete chemical substance in all intoxicating drinks, physicians reconsidered the individual’s responsibility for becoming a compulsive drinker. Looking to science and medicine for legitimacy, temperance reformers ascribed a deleterious agency to alcohol and personified it as an agent of physiological destruction. Alcohol destroyed the body and transformed natural alimentary desires into a compulsive artificial appetite for alcohol. Reformers, prohibitionists, and physicians were troubled that alcohol possessed the ability to destroy the physical capacity for the power of choice. Ascribing agency to alcohol destabilized long-standing understandings of intemperance as a vice and imbued habitual drunkenness with medical meanings. However, most professionals remained anxious about absolving the habitual drunkard of all responsibility, especially for taking the first drink. An inchoate attempt to capture the medical and moral dilemmas of compulsion, habitual drunkenness represents a conceptual missing link in the genealogy of addiction.

“Letters from Honest People” and “Letters from Hell”: Emergent Visceral Publics in Carrie Nation’s Smasher’s Mail

ABSTRACT Grounded in Jenell Johnson’s theory of visceral publics, this study examines 229 letters published in the Smasher’s Mail, an American temperance newspaper edited by Progressive-era reformer Carrie (or Carry) Nation 1 at the height of her 1901 saloon-smashing crusade to enforce Kansas prohibition. Because the newspaper printed letters from citizens who energetically endorsed saloon-smashing as a tactic of pro-temperance agitation and from those who vociferously opposed it, this analysis illuminates how Nation’s paper functioned as an important platform for fervid public deliberation over the perceived necessity of temperance reform and the best means of achieving it. Exploring what the smashing controversy meant to real people and the powerful feelings it elicited on both sides of the debate, this study demonstrates the emergence of two oppositional visceral publics bound by shared intense feelings over perceived boundary violations involving the borders of the human body, the home, private enterprise, law and order, and the “woman’s sphere.” Pro-smashing writers, who elevated their alcohol-free vision of the common good over the individual rights of saloonkeepers and their patrons, saw saloon-smashing as justified, even necessary, to protect society from the consequences of intemperance. In contrast, smashing opponents, rejecting prohibitionist calls to regulate private behavior for the common good, prioritized saloonkeepers’ and patrons’ individual rights of life, liberty, and property.

Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth About America’s Anti-Alcohol Crusade ed. by Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm

Reviewed by: Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth About America’s Anti-Alcohol Crusade ed. by Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm Caryn E. Neumann Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth About America’s Anti-Alcohol Crusade. Edited by Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 179. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7038-0.) The standard narrative of Prohibition is widely known. Prohibition, spear-headed by religious conservatives, came about primarily because of World War I. The Eighteenth Amendment sought to ban individual drinking but instead resulted in increased alcohol consumption. Prohibition changed little about American drinking habits while fueling organized crime. Its failure led to the Eighteenth Amendment’s repeal in 1933. This uniquely American experiment involved debates that are similar to those surrounding marijuana legalization. But according to essays by some of the most prominent scholars of Prohibition, the claims made in the preceding sentences are myths. Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm germinated this book after hearing alcohol scholars at a conference “bemoaning the gap between what scholars know about Prohibition and what much of the public believes about it” (p. vii). The contributors range from historians to political scientists to sociologists. All of the essays are strong, but Garrett Peck’s discussion of American drinking habits is one of the livelier ones. I learned from Peck, a Washington, D.C., [End Page 175] tour guide, that December 5, Repeal Day, is now also known in some quarters as “Cinco de Drinko” (p. 133). Despite what promotions at today’s bars would have us believe, alcohol consumption decreased during Prohibition, as Lewis notes in his essay. H. Paul Thompson Jr. differentiates between temperance advocates and prohibitionists. By the 1830s, temperance had become abstinence from all intoxicating beverages. Many activists believed that only personal religious transformation would lead to abstinence, while others argued that the best reform came by reaching the conscience through moral suasion. Some temperance reformers supported prohibition, and their numbers increased after state and local prohibition defeats in Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia during the 1880s persuaded many that moral and legal suasion had to go “hand in hand” (p. 12). Prohibitionists, in contrast, kept a narrower focus on the law, and dominated after 1900. In his essay, Hamm points out that while Prohibition helped organized crime expand, it also drove an expansion of crime fighting. The federal police force grew, coordination between investigators of crimes and prosecutors became routine, and the age of mass incarceration began. Joe L. Coker argues that crediting religious conservatives for Prohibition misses the diversity of its supporters, a group that included both fundamentalists and Progressives. Thomas R. Pegram argues that it was the coming of the Great Depression, rather than general dissatisfaction with a dry United States, that led to repeal. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski explains that Prohibition did not come about because of a “sudden burst of patriotic fervor” after World War I. Instead, she argues, it was the product of “a lengthy process” at the local, county, and state levels. Szymanski shows that “in the South, with its well-developed local option laws,” activists focused on “achieving statewide measures that established prohibition in the rural areas” (p. 55). In his contribution, Mark Lawrence Schrad surveys prohibition in eleven countries, including Russia, which became the first to go dry in 1915. The ban became a contributing factor in Czar Nicholas II’s fall from power, as wealthy distillers monopolized the few railroads to ship vodka out of the country, leaving soldiers on the German front without necessary supplies. And in the collection’s final essay, Bob L. Beach argues that the debate over marijuana legalization is only superficially the same as the push to repeal Prohibition since the drug does not have the same role in U.S. society as alcohol did during the Progressive era. None of the authors pay much attention to popular culture despite its role in creating the myths that they dispel. The citations tend to be more typical of conference papers than scholarly essays. Lewis misses John Burnham’s pioneering work on decreased alcohol consumption. Overall, however, Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled...

Intemperate Reform: Cripped Associations in Walt Whitman's Franklin Evans

Benjamin Rush's foundational work in temperance reform influenced early nineteenth-century reformers to associate democracy with the sober, able body. In the early 1840s, the explosive growth of Washingtonian Total Abstinence Societies, a working-class movement based out of Baltimore, began to shift temperance culture away from its earlier bourgeois formulations. Written for the Washingtonians, Walt Whitman's Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate (1842) attempts to refigure the relationship between the body and the body politic. Building upon work from disability studies and crip theory, this paper considers how Whitman's approach to the genre of the temperance novel and the underlying ideas of the movement were shaped by his relationship with his brother Eddy, a person with physical and mental disabilities. Through scenes set in a crowded and chaotic New York City, Whitman questions what role people with non-normative bodies and minds can have in a democracy. Through depictions of vulnerable, dependent, and abnormal bodies, Franklin Evans imagines a form of association that not only acknowledges but depends upon the embodiment of citizens to locate and address political, economic, and social systems in need of reform.

Canada Dry or High Times?: A Historiographical Look at Drugs and Alcohol in Canada

Drugs and alcohol have been featured in Canadian history as critical commodities that influenced legal decisions, social interactions, medical options, and even trade decisions. Canadian historians have examined alcohol, drugs, temperance reformers, and intoxicated Canadians in ways that deepen our understanding of how mind-altering products have influenced our Canadian values and how those ideas have changed over time. In this historiographical article, I examine how Canadian historians have responded to trends in historical scholarship that embrace a focus on social history, labour, women, medicine, colonialism, and culture. I argue that alcohol and drugs are ubiquitous in these historiographical shifts but that the uneven pace of decriminalizing intoxication has also led to new sources of information, new historical voices, and perhaps the need to rethink how our attitudes towards psychoactivity have affected our understanding of Canadian history.

American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era ed. by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon and Laura Mammina

Reviewed by: American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era ed. by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon and Laura Mammina Katherine E. Rohrer (bio) American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era. Edited by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, and Laura Mammina. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. Cloth, $50.00.) George C. Rable, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama, left an indelible mark on the fields of southern and Civil War history. American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era offers a collection of essays as thematically diverse as the work produced by the contributors’ mentor. Editors Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, and Laura Mammina have assembled an insightful and engaging volume that seeks to honor, yet expand upon, Rable’s eclectic scholarship, which spans military, political, religious, and gender history. The volume likewise captures Rable’s emphasis on the agency of everyday people. In the editors’ words, “All of these scholarly inquiries begin with the premise that ordinary human beings and their experiences matter—that the dynamics among family, friends, and enemies have not only local consequences but often sweeping national consequences as well” (3). The collection of fifteen essays is divided into three loosely chronological sections, exploring the sectional crisis, the war, and Reconstruction. The editors center each of these sections on a unifying topic: part 1 on “party politics and political culture,” part 2 on “political and military conflicts,” and part 3 on “Reconstruction and counterrevolution.” The four essays included in part 1 collectively reveal Americans, particularly northerners, to be disinterested in political compromise as they entered the 1860s. For example, Bever explores northern temperance reformers who, at the time of the 1860 presidential election, argued that intemperance was a national sin more threatening than chattel slavery and more pressing than even the secession crisis. Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. considers the crucial yet understudied role of newspaper advertisements in shaping public opinion. Americans widely read advertisements in the mid-nineteenth century, and partisan merchants in the North found effective ways to associate their products with politics. They exploited a new market for politically themed badges, biographies, and lithographs. Continuing the theme of political division, Christian McWhirter analyzes popular songs by northerners and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, written about Abraham Lincoln both before and after his 1865 assassination. Next, the six essays included in part 2 build on the previous section’s theme of internal conflict, particularly as it relates to issues of law, race, environment, and gender. Lindsay Rae Privette considers the role that contaminated water and dehydration played for both Union and Confederate troops during the siege of Vicksburg. Using an environmental [End Page 440] lens, Privette concludes that the inability to access safe drinking water not only was debilitating to soldier health, but also contributed to the consequential Confederate defeat at Vicksburg. Mammina offers an insightful analysis of the relationships forged between four Union soldiers and four southern women, Black and white, elite and nonelite. Mammina argues that all eight expressed a strong preference for domesticity. In her words, “This adherence to domesticity even in the turbulence of war reveals that this idea—with its emphasis on the patriarchal control of male heads of household, the duty of a husband to support and protect his family, the woman’s control over household matters, and the obedience and service that a wife owed to her husband—was intimately linked to ideas of political power” (165). Charity Rakestraw and Kristopher A. Teters focus on the little-known experiences of Black female refugees in Union camps. The coauthors ascribe significant agency to these women, maintaining that they actively controlled their own fates in an uncertain environment and with virtually no leverage. In 1984, Rable published But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction, which rejects the preexisting scholarship contending that Americans had failed to remedy the nation’s sin of slavery and racial discrimination. In contrast, Rable argues that Reconstruction did offer a radical agenda, one that prompted white southerners to respond via violent counterrevolution. The five essays included in part 3...

Cultural Marginalization and Folk Football in England:The case of Hurling, 1600-1860

ABSTRACT This article explores the history of Hurling, a form of folk football, played predominantly in the south-west of England, between 1600 and 1860. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to the so-called ‘origins of football’ debate by examining evidence of the ’cultural marginalization’ of the game, originally outlined by the sociologist Eric Dunning. First, though, it examines Carew’s early account of the sport in which he describes two varieties of the game. Hurling ‘to goals’ and Hurling ‘to the country’, one a relatively small sided game, the other a mass spectacle. The decline of the mass game is outlined indicating that the local gentry were increasingly discouraged from sponsoring it as a result of the rise in strong Evangelical beliefs. The general population being substantively influenced by the growth in Methodism, temperance reform and teetotal movements. Original evidence is presented, however, of the survival of the small-sided game through mid-century as more commercially oriented sponsors, notably publicans, continued to play a significant role in the recreational life of miners at a time when is has been claimed by some ‘dominant paradigm’ historians that folk football was, in essence, ‘dead’ by the 1830s. Smaller contests persisted and were even supported by local authorities with some still remaining in place to the current day. This evidence then furthers the notion that distinct forms of football in different regions of Britain had divergent histories and cannot be accounted for within all-encompassing grand narratives such as a ‘civilizing process’

The American Civil War and the Course of Late Nineteenth-Century Temperance Reform

Historians often analyze the US Civil War in the context of political, social, and economic change but fail to appreciate its role in fomenting dramatic developments in temperance and alcohol reform. The war caused rifts between Northern and Southern temperance organizations; disrupted temperance fund-raising, recruitment, and outreach activities; and placed more than a million young men in danger of succumbing to the intemperance then rampant in the Union and Confederate armies. In addition, the Union’s revenue policy levied taxes on distilled and fermented beverages, raising fears among temperance reformers that the federal government sanctioned the production and use of alcohol. In response, new temperance initiatives emerged after the war: increased women’s activism, the resurgence of prohibition in national politics, and new approaches to understanding and treating alcohol abuse. These developments ramified beyond the United States to affect temperance activism internationally.

All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing by Carmel Finley

633 Reviews White and male.) Moreover, commercialization dramatically altered labor resources, as the harvest-time hands of family members and neighbors gave way to floating multitudes of “unskilled” hop-pickers, often drawn from the lowest ranks of society, whose wages were based on the weight of their hauls and the color of their skin. This was especially true in the American West, where the labor of a kaleidoscope of pickers — Indigenous, Asian, European, and American — accentuated the fault lines of race and class. Finally, Kopp argues that from the landing of the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay to the initial rise of the Willamette Valley as the “Hop Center of the World,” the North American beer industry underwent a staggering level of Europeanization , only to return the favor by the turn of the twentieth century. Readers familiar with W.J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic (1979), a social history with remarkable staying power, will follow Kopp’s periodization with keen interest. By the mid nineteenth century, the palates and proficiency of German and Irish immigrants, along with the practices of temperance advocates, helped transform the United States into a nation of beer drinkers. Temperance reformers perceived German lager beer to be an acceptable, if temporary, alternative to rotgut in what had become a nation of drunkards. The Midwest became the center of American brewing, and the most enterprising hop growers and brewers sought to perfect local and regional hops that might compete on the world stage. This led them to the Northwest. Kopp’s most difficult work, and it is admirable , is in describing the transplantation and cultivation of hops in the Northwest during and after the antebellum period, where the historical evidence is fragmentary at best. Fort Vancouver, at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, provides the earliest documentary evidence of hops cultivated for sale, as the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) governor George Simpson and chief factor John McLaughlin included the crop in shipments to provision Russian fur traders in Sitka, Alaska. Despite HBC policies against imbibing the fruits of their labor, anecdotal evidence suggests that fur traders did more than sell this “brewer’s gold.” The Gilded Age ascendance of the Willamette Valley as the nation’s leading hops producer helped some Oregon businesses endure the Prohibition years through crop and marketing diversification, and yet, exports continued in a global capitalist market unfazed by moral reform. After repeal, towns such as Independence responded to demand (the “hop rush”) by pioneering hop festivals to both attract workers and celebrate community, even if the “heritage” portrayed at these events suffered from Anglo historical amnesia. The post– World War II industrialization of the industry brought challenges to Oregon in the form of downy mildew and competition from corporate giants with their bland, seemingly hop-less macrobrews. Nevertheless, the partnerships formed in this period among growers, brewers, U.S. Department of Agriculture geneticists, and academic researchers (primarily from Oregon State University) led to the cultivation new hops varieties that would become staples of the craft beer revolution, long after the Yakima Valley had eclipsed the Willamette Valley in hops production. Ryan Dearinger Eastern Oregon University ALL THE BOATS ON THE OCEAN: HOW GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES LED TO GLOBAL OVERFISHING by Carmel Finley University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2017. Illustrations, notes, index. 224 pages. $45.00, cloth. Anyone who visited an Oregon beach during the early 1970s likely remembers huge ships hovering just beyond the twelve-mile limit of American sovereignty. Few saw those ships up close, but everyone knew they belonged to a 634 OHQ vol. 118, no. 4 vast Russian fleet that constituted half the tonnage of the global industrial fishery. For most residents and tourists, the ships made tangible the abstract specter of a Cold War enemy. For fishers, however, the Russians were taking all of their halibut, rockfish, and salmon. This is how many North Americans learned about the globalization of industrial fishing, but by then, the fishery’s expansion was decades old and stretched from the Barents Sea to the Southern Ocean, from the Caribbean to the Benguela Bight, and from Micronesia to the horizon off McPhillips Beach in 1971. The economic and ecological impact...

Hawthorne’s Distillery: Time and Temperance in “The Birth-Mark” And Other Tales

Abstract Drawing on a wide range of temperance reform literature, this essay examines the temporal dimensions of America’s antebellum crusade against alcohol and their remarkably complex treatment in the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The inebriates in Hawthorne’s tales are not necessarily drinkers (the writer’s fondness for drink is well known), but rather those reformers and idealists who, in their zeal for perfection, seek to obliterate the past. In his richest portrait of this temporal intemperance, “The Birth-Mark” (1843), Hawthorne portrays the perilous nature and effects of the cultural amnesia that flows from America’s intoxicating confidence in the transformative power of industrial technology. To counter the temporal imbalance of an industrializing nation drunk with the spirit of innovation, Hawthorne’s “temperance” tales ultimately offer a distillation of time that transports the reader into a fluid realm of temporal ambiguity where past, present, and future converge. Reaching far beyond its reformist connotations, “temperance” ultimately proves to be a seminal metaphor for the imaginative state of temporal equilibrium that Hawthorne would achieve as a writer of historical romances.

Temperance Songs in American School Songbooks, 1840–1860

Early school songbooks in the United States served an important role. During the period from the introduction of public school music to the appearance of graded music series, they provided essential song literature and instructional material for early public school music classes. These songbooks often included patriotic songs, songs of the season, and songs about music, and moral and social themes were common. Some sources specifically note the inclusion of temperance songs, but little research has been done on how frequently this occurred. This study explores the inclusion of temperance songs in twenty-three school songbooks during the period from 1840 to 1860, noting dominant themes and tactics utilized by temperance reformers. Findings suggest that many school songbook compilers considered temperance reform an important concern and sought to influence both children and their parents by focusing on the dangers of alcohol. Several dominant themes were identified, including “Cold Water,” “Beware the Cup,” “Temperance Army,” “Home and Family,” and “Take the Pledge.” Although lyricists utilized both persuasion (moral suasion) and coercion, findings do not support the shift toward coercive tactics reported by temperance historians during the 1850s.

Wilson, Ivy G., ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Ivy G. Wilson, ed. Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. xx + 210 pp.Halfway through Ivy G. Wilson's Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet, Christopher Freeburg writes: Whitman was a racist, and he did subscribe to white supremacist ideas and (90). Freeburg's assessment here intuits, I think, contradiction sometimes complicates this necessary and often thrilling collection of essays. For many, remains democratic poet of America, and so confusion easily abounds when Whitman's racist politics are unearthed. This is a pertinent issue cropped up last year at Northwestern University-where Wilson works-when M.A. music student Timothy McNair protested vaunting of as a democrat by refusing to perform a musical setting of his poetry, which led to a failing course grade. Instead of definitively sorting out Whitman's attitudes toward Afro Americans, Noir productively engages his conflicted inheritance, paying homage to an underappreciated and longstanding tradition of black authors embracing rather than rejecting Whitman's poetry. Natasha Trethewey exemplifies this collection's wide-ranging engagement with on race when she writes, From where I stand, it's easy to feel kinds of contradictions evident in Whitman's work, those things he revealed both intentionally and inadvertently (171). Indeed, Whitman's specters of blackness, and our own haunting by his white supremacy, offer another valence to noir of this collection's title, all more striking for its understatement.Whitman Noir is divided into two parts, first comprised of scholarly essays on relation of to blackness and of subsequent black writers to by-aside from Wilson and Freeburg-Ed Folsom, Amina Gautier, Matt Sandler, and Jacob Wilkenfeld. The second part of book reprints previously published personal and political reflections on by Trethewey and June Jordan, as well as publishes for first time short pieces by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (on Garcia Lorca and Whitman) and George Hutchinson (on visiting Whitman's home and grave in Camden). C. L. R. James, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Martin Delany, James Weldon Johnson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with many of book's own contributors, provide testament to diverse ways black writers have invoked Whitman. This is a reckoning is consistently laudatory and skeptical, if not downright aghast, of Whitman. One can appreciate, for instance, Jordan's deep alienation from her New Critical schooling while being confounded by her lament over the peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman-which, thankfully, seems dated today (157). It is hard not to love, though, her earnest and playful pronouncement: Listen to this white father; he is so weird (158).The first three essays of this collection-by Folsom, Gautier, and Sandler-are most striking. Folsom shows how Whitman's temporary persona as mash'd in Song of Myself is based upon-both historically and in poet's drafts-a black fireman (unmentioned in published poem) for whom white faces become visible: White and beautiful are faces around me, heads are bared of their fire-caps (5). Whitman, we learn, erases blackness in legible ways, inscribing through development of his corpus formative presence as well as increasing absence of slaves and freedmen. In following essay, Gautier mines Whitman's 1842 temperance novel Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate with dogged singularity, emerging with sterling conclusion Evans' storied self-possession is only won through his ownership of Louis-the brother of creole slave Margaret to whom Evans is briefly married. Whitman shows, writes Gautier, that Evans' own self-mastership is ultimately dependent upon his ownership of Louis (47). thereby unravels intemperance is slavery metaphor animated Washingtonian temperance reformers of time, showing how temperance here literally means mastery over another. …

Bronterre O’Brien and the Meaning of Radical Reputation in the Age of the Chartists

T hough it differed from place to place and was rarely able to present a united front, the Chartist movement promoted the clearest and most direct plan of political reform known to nineteenth-century Britain—the six points of the People’s Charter of 1838: manhood suffrage, vote by ballot, annual elections, equal electoral districts, payment of Members of Parliament, and the abolition of property qualifications for the latter. Opinions differ as to the main spur behind Chartism—whether it was a movement of the politically excluded and therefore an expression of political identity, or primarily a workingclass response to the industrial revolution and an expression of class consciousness. Some Chartist leaders and many of their followers did not hail from the laboring ranks. Many in the movement went beyond the six points and pursued social and economic goals, and there was some overlap in personnel and tactics between Chartism and other agitations, including those for temperance, church and law reform, antislavery, free trade, land redistribution, popular education, and international peace. MICHAEL J. TURNER

Thomas Cole's Intemperate Empire

This article situates The Course of Empire (1836), a five-canvas cycle of landscape paintings by American artist Thomas Cole (1801–1848), within the discourse of physiology and temperance reform in the early nineteenth-century United States. Heretofore uninvestigated compositional and thematic resonances between The Course of Empire and Nathaniel Currier (1813–1888) and James Ives's (1824–1895) popular temperance print The Drunkard's Progress (1846) reveal how each charted terminal cases of unregulated consumption from the point of infection through the death of their respective subjects. The two scenes at the apex of these narratives, The Consummation of Empire and “A Confirmed Drunkard,” represent official diagnoses that mark precise moments when self-agency is irrevocably surrendered to objects of desire. They mark points of no return and initiate self-destruct sequences that cause the body and the body politic to fall to pieces.

Picturing the “Road to Ruin”: Visual Representations of a Standard Temperance Narrative, 1830–1855

Within a few years of the establishment of an English temperance movement in the early 1830s, some radical temperance reformers distanced themselves from principles of moderation in order to promote the more extreme tenets of teetotalism and total abstinence. Temperance propaganda regularly employed a “road to ruin” narrative in order to warn drinkers of the inevitability of economic and spiritual ruin resulting from the consumption of alcohol. Illustration was occasionally used to reinforce the written text, the most notable being George Cruikshank's eight-plate series The Bottle (1847). However, images published during the late 1840s and 1850s show that a few individuals, including Cruikshank (1792–1878), challenged entrenched attitudes and radically shifted the focus of temperance propaganda.

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.

Lee L. Willis. Southern Prohibition: Race, Reform, and Public Life in Middle Florida, 1821–1920.

Too often state and local historians view history absent of macro-trends, broad interpretations, and context beyond the political boundaries of the local. In this book, Lee L. Willis examines prohibition in one small southern community through multiple lenses, addressing race, class, gender, and the meaning of reform in the United States during the nineteenth century. For Willis, the political movement to regulate the sale of alcoholic beverages was intimately connected to and reflected the position of white men in relation to white women and blacks in Florida. When and how men and women are allowed to drink or even when and how men and women are allowed to politically mobilize to regulate drinking speaks to and reflects the social stratification of their communities, as Willis demonstrates. Willis connects the early nineteenth-century reform that grew out of the Second Great Awakening with the Progressives of the late nineteenth century to suggest that there was more continuity to this movement (as well as other reform movements) than previous historians have assumed. Although temperance reform might have been the issue, it was also the locus where not only public life but frustrations about race, women, and politics could be measured. Additionally Willis demonstrates that reformers in southern locations like Tallahassee were not passive or nonexistent in early temperance organizing but central to the temperance movement as part of a grassroots organizing phenomenon connected to influential groups around the country.

Jennifer M. Ross‐Nazzal . Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe . Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2011. Pp. xv, 256. $26.95.

In this book, Jennifer M. Ross‐Nazzal explores the life of one of the least well‐known but most important leaders in the American equal suffrage movement. Not as prominent as Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, or Alice Paul, Emma Smith DeVoe waged a four‐decade battle to obtain the ballot for American women. Ross‐Nazzal traces DeVoe's organizing efforts in several midwestern and western states ranging from Illinois and Iowa to Idaho and Washington. The author begins with DeVoe's early years in the Dakota territory promoting temperance reform. Her experience with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union both introduced her to the world of politics and steered her into her first equal suffrage campaign. Ross‐Nazzal argues that DeVoe's experience in the South Dakota suffrage campaign helped convince her of the best tactics and strategies suffragists should employ. Femininity and a less confrontational style, DeVoe concluded, would be a more effective strategy to convince male voters to grant women the ballot.

A Transnational Temperance Discourse? William Wells Brown, Creole Civilization, and Temperate Manners

In the nineteenth century, temperance movements provided the occasion for a transnational discourse. These conversations possessed an intensity throughout Britain and the United States. In America temperance often became associated with strongly nationalistic Euro-American forms of identity and internal purity. Nonetheless, African American reformers and abolitionists bound themselves to temperance ideals in forming civil societies that would heal persons and provide communal modes of democratic freedom in the aftermath and recovery from chattel slavery. This paper explores the possibilities of temperance as a transnational discourse by considering its meaning in the life and work of the African American author and activist, William Wells Brown. Brown expressed a “creole civilization” that employed the stylistics of the trickster as a unique mode of restraint that revealed a peculiar power of passivity that was able to claim efficacy over one’s life and community. This meaning of temperance diverges from and dovetails with certain European meanings of civilization that were being forged in the nineteenth century. Brown was in conversation with temperance reformers in America, Britain, and Europe. He imagined the possible meaning of temperance in African, Egyptian, Christian, and Islamic civilizations. He speculated upon the possibility of temperance as a defining characteristic of a transnational civilization and culture that would provide spaces for the expression of democratic freedom. Brown reimagined temperance as a form of corporeal restraint that offered a direct and sacred relation to the land, space, people that appeared in between an ethnic nationalist ethos and the European imperialistic civilization.

Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw

614 Mississippi Quarterly Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 331 pp. $45.00. IN THIS EXPANSIVE YET TAUT ANALYSIS OF A DIVERSE COLLECTION OF autobiographical narratives (“life stories”), Peggy Whitman Prenshaw elegantly wrangles the composed selves of a concatenation of women who grew up in the South in the “late Southern Victorian period”—i.e., between the end of the Civil War and the 1930s. Fiction writers, political activists, loyal wives, dutiful daughters—these nineteen Southern women facilitate Prenshaw’s nuanced examination of the complex intersections—in their lives and in their books—of region; gender; class; race; and the subtle, intricate operations of memory, reliability, and subjectivity. Prenshaw asserts that her varied subjects, born and bred with the limitations and expectations of Southern womanhood, stride into risky terrain in their presumption to tell their own stories. As women and as Southerners, her authors generally create “relational” personae, framing their stories and their evolving identities within their relationships with family, community, and (in several instances) the larger world. And yet, Prenshaw argues, however oblique and mediated their narrative stance, these female Southerners, by the very act of writing their own lives, exhibit “the considerable skill and courage necessary to a realization of the self on the printed page” (294). The women Prenshaw presents in Composing Lives share a Southern provenance that is fundamental in their coming of age as women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prenshaw, a scholar of Southern literature, is particularly insightful in her explication of the distinctive and powerful intersection of gender and region, and its profound influence on the South’s daughters. Prenshaw explains the cultural, social, and economic implications of the South’s development from the defeated antebellum Old South to the New South of the new century, and the “divided ideals, even contradictions” of this vexed transition, which, she suggests, parallel the “divided impulses” of the women who are the subjects of her study (7, 8). Consistent in their appropriation of the regional archetypes that determine their younger lives—the indomitable patriarchy, the “Southern belle” myth’s demand for female grace, beauty, and dedication to others—these women 615 Book Reviews nonetheless grow into very diverse lives; and the structure of Composing Lives underscores their similarities and differences. Beginning with the older generation of women who came of age just after the Civil War (suffragist, temperance reformer, and Mississippi state senator Belle Kearney; activist Alabaman Helen Keller; Anne Walter Fearn, a physician in China), Prenshaw then considers the “wifehood narratives” of Mary Hamilton, an uneducated, hard-working wife and mother from the rugged Mississippi Delta, and Agnes Grinstead Anderson, whose Approaching the Magic Hour recounts her undeviating devotion to painterWalterAnderson,amanwhosedazzlingartistictalentcontrasted with his dramatic shortcomings as a husband and father. A grouping of women who left the South of their childhoods to follow their accomplished husbands into a more public life includes Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair, Virginia Foster Durr, Lindy Claiborne Boggs, and Lylah Scarborough Barber. InherdiscussionofthemoreideologicalautobiographiesofKatharine Dupre Lumpkin and Lillian Smith, who wrote to indict a system of racial injustice, Prenshaw foregrounds the awareness of and sensitivity to race and racism that (sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly) pervades these books by women who were formed by a society grappling with the long legacy of slavery. In the later chapters, Prenshaw deftly examines the personal stories of accomplished fiction writers (Ellen Glasgow, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, Bernice Kelly Harris, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, and Ellen Douglas), whose life writings demonstrate the literary sophistication, narrative facility, and keen observations of successful novelists. In her analysis of the writers’ lives—relayed in books such as Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings and Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road—Prenshaw most compellingly articulates a central theme of Composing Selves: the mutability of memory, subjectivity, and readers’ expectations and assumptions when reading autobiographical writing. As she concludes, “I have come to view autobiography not just as a literary form but as something of a literary ‘venue,’ a site of negotiation among the principal agents—memory, unfolding identity, and the demands of inscribed narrative, that is, sequence, causality, and coherence” (294). In skillfully negotiating...