In the nineteenth century, the evils of demon rum were proclaimed from pulpits and attacked by various temperance groups. These efforts would be seen in this century as precursors of the prohibition movement which would result in the era of Prohibition, a failed social experiment that may actually have increased drinking rather than reducing it. The methods used by the movement changed during the course of the century, and success was spotty at best. The movement branched out to include a wide variety of other social concerns under one umbrella and so helped generate the kind of reform impulse that fired the progressive Movement at the beginning of this century.
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 and moral terms. His sermons were widely circulated. A group formed in Massachusetts to follow his teachings was called the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, later shorted to the American Temperance Society (Mendelson and Mello 28-29).
The American temperance Society is seen as offering a major innovation in the politics of special interest groups:
By organizing large numbers of energetic, middle-class men and women into locally based volu...