goal of the WCTU. The Anti-Saloon League would take over from the WCTU in the fight against alcohol after 1900.
Bordin is interested here in the history of temperance, and she notes that the era of prohibition which ended in 1933 caused a problem in that historians then ignored the depth and scope of the problem Prohibition had attempted to solve; namely, the problem of alcoholism:
A whole generation of writers viewed temperance agitation as a frivolous interference with basic individual liberty and a preoccupation with an issue that was at best marginal to the real problems of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society. Historians saw the saloon as a benign institution that served a vital social function as a poor man's club.
For Bordin, though, the history leading up to Prohibition is important and helps define the problem that the Eighteenth Amendment was meant to address. Numerous writers in addition to Bordin emphasize that the end of the experiment with prohibition in 1933 was not an end to the underlying problem, which has continued to plague society and to cry out for some solution. Among the larger social problems associated by Bordin with alcoholism are tensions created by class differences and uneven income distribution, which in turn can be related to disparities in education, pressures brought about by industrialization, and problems brought about by urbanization.
John Kobler is another historian of temperance who sees the issue as beginning long before 1920. Indeed, he begins his book with the story of the American physician Benjamin Rush, who in 1609 pontificated on a variety of medical subjects, including the problem of alcoholism. In so doing, he was going against the social views of his time, for the colonies prized alcohol as "one of the good creatures of God, to be received with thanksgiving." He traces the development of the temperance movement from the American colonial era through t...