The Temperance Movement

The Temperance Movement had a boom in the early part of the nineteenth century and then lost power in the 1820s in the face of social elitism, ineffective tactics, and internal squabbling. Ten years later, the issue emerged once more as a major social movement "its power and influence increased almost in direct proportion to its companion religious reform movement, the Great Awakening" (Mendelson and Mello 27). The two movements came together in the form of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, who undertook to fight the evils of alcohol beginning in 1810. His most famous sermon came in 1825 and was called "Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils and Remedy of Intemperance." Beecher was one of the first to suggest the outright banning of distilled beverages. He characterized intemperance in both physical an

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League would take over from the WCTU in the fight against alcohol after 1900 (Bordin xviii). Bordin is interested here in the history of temperance, and she notes that the era of prohibition which ended in 1933 caused a 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 (Bordin xiv-xv). For Bordin, though, the history leading up to Prohibition is important and helps define the problem that the Eighteenth Amendment was meant to address. John Kobler is another historian of temperance who sees the issue as beginning long before 1920. Indeed, he begins his book in 1609 with the American physician Benjamin Rush, who 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
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1542
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)