Prohibition was the culmination of nearly a century’s worth of propaganda, and repeated failed attempts to get such laws to work at the local and state level. Read J.C. Furnas’ The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum for an overview of the pre-1919 Temperance/Prohibition movement.
… [T]he original Temperance movement started out with the very best of intentions, and was trying to deal with a real problem. In colonial and early-19th-century America, people (men, women and OH HORRORS even children!) drank enough that by modern standards we’d call them alcoholics. Modern Russians drink more, but if they were transported back to that time and place, they’d fit right on in. Part of it was because water was often not safe to drink (tea and coffee were often expensive and hard to get, while beer and other alcoholic drinks were made just about everywhere), part of it was snobbery (only really poor people drank water!) and part of it was because people back then believed that alcohol strengthened and warmed the body.
Two of the good side effects of the Temperance/Prohibition movement were the provision of safe, clean drinking water in American cities and towns, and the modern fruit-juice industry (as a lot of churches went hot-Prohibition, they got uneasy about serving wine at Communion, so they went to work and came up with non-alcoholic substitutes.) Welch’s Grape Juice was started by a pastor who wanted non-alcoholic “wine” for Communion, and caught on, real big.
Eric Oppen, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2020-06-18.
September 21, 2020
QotD: Prohibition and the Temperance movement
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