i-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.
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 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 the creation of the Women's Christian Temperance League and others in the late nineteenth century to the Noble Experiment, Prohibition, from 1920 to 1934.
Kobler draws on statements and writings by people who lived through these different eras, and he features their words as he describes the time in which they lived and relate...