Temperance and Prohibition
For thousands of years, concerns had been expressed about the harmful effects of alcohol on human health and social order, but they were mere murmurs when compared with the furor of the attack on alcohol that rose during the nineteenth century. Temperance societies appeared in the 1830s, and fifty years later, mass organizations were dedicated to limiting the availability and reducing the consumption of alcoholic beverages or to eliminating them altogether. Powerful temperance and prohibitionist movements, many with religious affiliations, attracted widespread support in many parts of the world, notably in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. Working in national and subnational arenas and cooperating internationally, they publicized their messages in newspapers, pamphlets, and books and broadcast them in speeches and lectures. Many took to the streets to put pressure on governments to bring the alcohol business under control or to put it out of business altogether. To that time, it was the largest civilian mobilization of people and resources ever assembled to achieve a single policy goal, and it resulted in a wave of prohibition and near-prohibition policies in many countries during and soon after the First World War.
Historians have paid a lot of attention to these antialcohol organizations and their leaderships and, more generally, to the politics of alcohol in the nineteenth century.1 But far less attention has been given to the social, cultural, and material conditions that enabled the antialcohol movement to have such an impact on political culture and alcohol policies. These conditions included the broad changes that accompanied urbanization and industrialization in the 1800s, as well as more specific phenomena, such as the rise of Christian reform movements and gendered politics. At the material level, the availability and widening consumption of nonalcoholic beverages—especially potable water but also tea and coffee—had a critical impact on the cultural meaning of alcohol and made its consumption vulnerable to the attacks mounted by the organized antialcohol movements.
Although these organizations that emerged in the 1800s shared a general hostility toward alcohol, their broader strategies and immediate goals were often quite diverse. There were, first, important differences among those who called simply for moderation in drinking, those who called for voluntary abstinence by consumers, and those who wanted the total prohibition, by law, of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption. Some placed greatest weight on the health dangers of alcohol; others stressed the social disruption they believed it led to, while yet others drew attention to the dangers of alcohol for the growth and well-being of national populations, a powerful consideration in this period of intensified nationalism in Europe. Organizations with religious affiliations justified their positions by appeal to scripture, while others drew on secular and utilitarian arguments. Finally, women’s antialcohol organizations tended to focus on the dangers that drinking men posed to women, children, sexual morality, and the stability of the family.
Overall, the medium-term achievements of the antialcohol movement were impressive, but like the movements themselves, they varied from place to place. The best-known success was national prohibition in the United States, although prohibition policies of varying degrees were also to be found in countries as diverse as Russia, Mexico, Canada, Belgium, and Finland (see Chapter 13). In yet other countries, such as England and Scotland, such rigorous policies were rejected in favor of tighter regulations regarding the sale of alcohol. Many of these policies, we should note, were introduced only after the outbreak of the First World War (see Chapter 12), when the demands of a war economy made it politically feasible for governments to enact policies they had hesitated to impose during peacetime. That said, there is no denying the achievements of the antialcohol movements before the outbreak of the global war.
The strategies the various organizations adopted varied according to the laws, policy-making institutions, and drinking cultures they faced. In the United States, pressure was first put on state governments, and there was a particular focus on saloons as the primary sites of problematic drinking. In France and Germany, temperance campaigners pressed national authorities to ban distilled spirits. But there were some common features. Everywhere there was a wide range of organizations, with one or two dominant. There were divisions between those who campaigned for moderate drinking and those who insisted on total abstention, and between those who wanted voluntary abstinence and those who favored coercive policies of prohibition. Protestant churches generally embraced the antialcohol cause more enthusiastically than the Catholic Church, and women were prominent participants in most movements, sometimes as leaders, sometimes as members.
All these characteristics were to be found in the broad-based antialcohol campaign that arose in the United States from the early 1800s. Drawing on middle-class anxiety about the effects of alcohol on social stability, a number of state-based temperance societies were formed soon after the turn of the century. Rather than embrace voluntary total abstinence or prohibition, many had limited ambitions, like the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance (founded in 1813), which campaigned mainly against the consumption of spirits, the source of most of the alcohol consumed by Americans at that time. But by the 1830s, some organizations were beginning to insist that their members abstain entirely from alcohol (that is, adopt teetotalism), while others started to press for prohibition, which would have imposed abstinence on everyone by cutting off all sources of alcohol. Pressure from these organizations contributed to the adoption of stringent alcohol regulations in a number of states. In 1838, Massachusetts banned the sale of spirits in volumes of less than 15 gallons (effectively ending the retail sale of spirits for personal consumption by the mass of the population), and in the 1840s, other states began to restrict the sale of spirits. In 1847, in response to legal challenges to these restrictions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state governments had the power to refuse licenses to sell spirits.
Legislators in Maine took the fight against alcohol much further. As early as 1837, a committee of the state legislature decided that the most effective way to control drinking was to ban the sale of alcoholic beverages entirely, and after some transitional legislation, Maine became, in 1851, the first state to prohibit the production and sale of alcoholic beverages within its borders. State officials were empowered (if three citizens lodged a complaint against any individual) to search private premises for alcohol intended for sale, and a mandatory prison term was imposed for a third conviction of breaking the prohibition law.2 However, the Maine law did not prohibit the consumption of alcohol or its importation into the state for personal consumption. This meant that as long as alcohol was available in the contiguous states, many citizens of Maine had reasonable access to alcohol. By 1855, however, all the New England states had adopted prohibition laws, as had New York and a number of other states and territories. This initial tide of state-based prohibition laws crested during the 1850s and then ebbed. Maine’s legislators repealed the 1851 law in 1856, reenacted it in 1858 after a referendum, and finally entrenched prohibition in the state’s constitution in 1884. But many other states that had enacted prohibition-style laws in the 1850s repealed them by the late 1860s.
In the 1870s, following the Civil War, a second wave of antialcohol sentiment began to build. One of the most important organizations was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874 by women from sixteen states.3 Membership was limited to women, who were expected to abstain entirely from alcohol, and the organization’s initial mandate was to fight the evils of saloons and to lobby for a congressional inquiry into the alcohol trade. The WCTU justified women’s participation in political life on the ground that women had a special interest in defending family and home from the ravages of alcohol, and later (in 1881) it invoked the same argument when it added women’s suffrage to its agenda. Yet although the WCTU attracted wide support—it had about 150,000 members in the United States by 1890—and gave many women their first experience of political participation, it failed to make the impact on national politics that might have been expected.
The WCTU was dominated by Protestant women. Jewish women tended to distance themselves from it, partly because they objected to the Christian agendas (or the name of the WCTU), but more because they drank wine at Sabbath dinners and social gatherings and did not see alcohol as a problem in the Jewish community.4 Catholics largely stayed away because, although the WCTU made it clear that there was no “creed test” for membership, many temperance supporters opposed immigration, notably immigration by Catholics and especially from Ireland. Frances Willard, the most prominent leader of the WCTU, called on Congress in 1892 to prohibit “the influx into our land of more of the scum of the Old World, until we have educated those who are here.”5Some Catholic Irish Americans, inspired by the temperance work of Theobald Mathew (“Father Mathew”) in Ireland, took up the cause independently. The major Catholic society, the Catholic Total Abstinence Union, was founded in 1872 (before the WCTU), and it and its affiliates counted 90,000 members by the early 1900s. Temperance was far more popular among Irish than German Catholics, the latter seeing it as a threat to cultural activities such as Sunday beer-gardens. Irish Catholics, however, viewed temperance as a means of assimilating into American society and ridding themselves of the stereotypes that cast them as unclean, rowdy, brawling drinkers. Some of the supporters, like Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, an immigrant himself, probably did not help the Irish cause by suggesting in 1882 that his compatriots were inherently prone to drunkenness: “Alcohol does them more harm, because their warm nature yields more readily to its flames.”6 It was a strange conflation of the humoral theory of the body and prevailing ideas about the “natural” tendency of some populations, such as Native Americans, toward intoxication.
In time, Catholic organizations turned their attention to saloons, male-only bars that were seen as the worst manifestations of drinking in America; in 1890, one priest referred to them as “an illicit, a morally bad business.”7 But three years later, a Congregationalist minister, H. H. Russell, founded the Anti-Saloon League of America (ASLA), a much more important organization that initially aimed only to close saloons, not to prevent drinking at home, but which soon broadened its mandate to encompass a full-fledged prohibitionist program. Where the WCTU’s leadership had created divisions within its membership by allying with political parties that supported prohibition, the ASLA was resolutely nonpartisan and soon worked single-mindedly for prohibition. For the ASLA, the saloon—the working-class public house that had gained a reputation for being a rowdy, disreputable place where coarse men gathered to get drunk, blaspheme, gamble, and enjoy a thousand other vices—was a symbol of all that was wrong with the consumption of alcohol.8
The ASLA came into its own in the early 1900s, when it was the leading edge of the often disparate prohibition movement in the United States. It worked with other groups, funded prohibitionist activities at the state level, and became wealthy enough (thanks in part to financial support from millionaire prohibitionist John D. Rockefeller) to build a printing plant where it published its own books and pamphlets. Some were published in foreign languages so that the prohibitionist message would reach the immigrants who flowed into the United States from eastern and southern Europe at the turn of the century.
The influence of the ASLA on personal drinking behavior cannot be measured, but its impact on policy-makers can. Almost all American states adopted restrictive alcohol policies in the twenty years preceding the First World War, and many went so far as to enact strict prohibition. This patchwork of states that were either “dry” or “wet” (“damp” might be more descriptive of states that merely regulated alcohol rigorously) led to one of the ASLA’s greatest achievements: the 1913 Webb-Kenyon Act, which prohibited the movement of alcohol from a wet state to a dry one. Having achieved that, and with the wind in the sails of prohibition at the state level, the ASLA redoubled its efforts to secure nationwide prohibition by means of an amendment to the Constitution. By 1916 a prohibition-friendly Congress started the process by which the Eighteenth Amendment, enacting national prohibition, would be passed. Although the ASLA was only one of many antialcohol organizations, it was by far the most important in size and influence, and its contribution to having prohibition enacted in the United States is undeniable.
The English antialcohol movements are a study in both similarities and contrasts to their counterparts in the United States. The temperance movement—inspired by organizations in Scotland—first got under way in 1830 in northern industrial cities such as Manchester and Bradford before working its way south. By 1831 there were thirty societies, all with the relatively modest aim of stemming the excessive consumption of distilled spirits. Far from thinking that alcohol was evil and its consumption wrong, many of the first generation of English alcohol reformers drank wine and beer, and even drinkers of distilled spirits could be admitted as members of their societies.9 At this point they could not be called enemies of alcohol, as their policies demanded no more than supporters of moderate consumption had sought for centuries. This approach to what became known as “the drink question” achieved limited results. Although moderation succeeded in putting alcohol on the broader social reform agenda, the vast social gap between the middle-class reformers and those they believed to be most in need of reform—working-class men—militated against much practical success. Moreover, by tolerating wine and beer while targeting gin and other distilled spirits, these middle-class men could easily be portrayed as demonizing the common drink of workers while treating their own preferred alcoholic beverages as benign.
In a fairly short time, the moderate approach that aimed for temperate drinking was challenged by demands for more radical reforms, including complete abstinence from alcohol. Members of the original temperance societies who were abstainers formed their own societies, and soon the English antialcohol movement was split. The division was not only one of approach: reformists tended to be middle class, religious, and from London and the southern counties, while proponents of total abstinence were more often from the industrial north of the country, without religious affiliation, and reformed drinkers themselves with working-class roots.10 Drawing on their social affinity, the teetotalers worked to help heavy drinkers shake the habit, whereas the middle-class reformers had taken the view that existing drunkards were beyond help and that the main task was to prevent anyone from starting to drink heavily.
Working-class, self-help teetotalism became a feature of the antialcohol movement in England by the mid-nineteenth century, and abstinence was portrayed as a way to improve the lives of working men and their families. Some organizations were resolutely secular, such as the East London Chartist Temperance Association, which prohibited any discussion of religion for fear that it would be divisive and distract attention from the main issue.11 Members helped one another find work, and they were encouraged to trade among themselves as much as possible. At another level, refraining from alcohol was portrayed as a precondition for workers to obtain the vote and other political rights. Some socialists also argued for teetotalism for political reasons, seeing alcohol as one of the means by which employers kept their workers docile and uninterested in union and political activism.
But teetotalers of all kinds fought an uphill struggle. Drinking was solidly entrenched in English working-class culture, and the public house was the primary place for working men (and women, though less often) to socialize. All manner of events, from births and weddings to funerals, were marked by social drinking, and public houses were the principal or only public meeting places in many communities. (Many antialcohol organizations had difficulty finding locations for their meetings, and the wealthier among them built their own Temperance Halls.)12 Alcohol was also a medium of exchange, and drinks were offered as payment for small services; women who acted as attendants at funerals were customarily given a serving of rum. Above all, drinking in the company of friends, neighbors, and workmates was enjoyable, and alcohol was not only a social lubricant but also a social adhesive.
There was, of course, another side to drinking: alcohol could be equally effective in dissolving social bonds when provocative words were uttered and arguments and fights broke out in public houses and when drinking led to domestic violence in private homes. Alcohol runs like a steady stream in the records of the growing number of divorces in the nineteenth century. Often the records show a drunk husband beating his wife, but apologists for domestic violence sometimes explained male violence as provoked by women’s drinking: “In the vast majority of these cases, the suffering angel . . . is found to be rather an angel of the fallen class, who has made her husband’s home an earthly hell, who spends his earnings in drink.”13 In the later nineteenth century, divorce laws in many Western countries (and states in the United States) added persistent drunkenness to the grounds that justified dissolving a marriage. Maine added “gross and confirmed habits of intoxication” in 1883; Virginia added “habitual drunkenness” in 1891, while in Scotland (in 1903), habitual drunkenness was made equivalent to cruelty for the purpose of getting a judicial separation.14
But the overwhelming working-class male perception of alcohol was positive, and many English workers were hostile toward teetotalers, seeing them not only as dull and unsociable tea-drinkers but even as implicitly subversive of working-class culture. There were suspicions that teetotalers were in the pay of employers who wanted their workers to stop spending money on drinks so that they could reduce their wages. In fact, some employers fired employees who signed the abstinence pledge, because their presence among workers who continued to drink was disruptive and threatened the harmony of the workplace.
While dynamics such as these operated within the English working class, middle-class reformers began to mobilize against alcohol on a grand scale. One spur to action was the 1851 prohibition law passed in Maine, which was a different and much more rigorous model than any of the English organizations had envisaged. Teetotalers relied on moral persuasion, leaving it to drinkers to see the light and stop drinking voluntarily, but Maine’s legislators provided a model that, if adopted, gave drinkers no choice but to stop. It appealed to those who were convinced that alcohol was such a harmful commodity that the state ought to take it out of circulation, and it altered the terms of reference of some English antialcohol movements by shifting the object of their attention. Many advocates of abstention had become frustrated by their failure to convince consumers of alcohol to change their ways, and they began to lobby politicians and governments at all levels to enact policies that would severely limit or end the availability of alcohol. In this sense, the antialcohol activists became an explicitly political movement as much as one for social reform.
But although prohibition became a popular policy in the United States, the notion of a coercive, state-enforced prohibition on alcohol found little support in Britain. It was opposed by most alcohol reform organizations, and it was at odds with the prevailing middle-class ideology of liberalism, which envisaged the state as guaranteeing rather than erasing personal freedoms. John Stuart Mill, the leading liberal theorist, declared that prohibition policies were “monstrous” and an “illegitimate interference with the rightful liberty of the individual.” Drinking was a personal choice, he wrote, and even drunkenness “is not a fit subject for legislative interference.”15 Such sentiments seemed to be shared by most British legislators, even those critical of alcohol. Long-serving prime minister William Gladstone, for example, declared, “We have suffered more in our time from intemperance than from any war, pestilence, and famine combined,” and he encouraged the drinking of tea instead.16
But many British legislators were uneasy about even partial restrictions such as limitations on Sunday drinking. In 1854 a law was passed to prevent drinking places in England from opening on Sundays between 2:30 and 6:00 PM and after 10:00 PM, but it (together with a law prohibiting Sunday trading) generated massive protests. A crowd of working-class Londoners, estimated by Karl Marx (who was there) at 200,000, demonstrated in Hyde Park on a Sunday in June 1855. (Marx, who mistakenly thought this might be the beginning of the workers’ revolution, noted that some of the gentry, in the park for their weekly outing, seemed to be somewhat under the weather from their lunchtime wine.) The law was amended to require pubs to close from 3:00 to 5:00 PM and after 11:00 PM, which allowed ninety minutes’ more drinking time on Sunday afternoons than the original form.17
This compromise represented only a partial victory for supporters of Sunday closing in England, and their counterparts elsewhere in Britain were even more successful. Pubs were ordered closed throughout the day on Sundays in Scotland in 1854, in Ireland (except for the main cities) in 1878, and in Wales in 1881. But despite their general failure to have much impact on policy or (as far as we can tell) consumption patterns, England’s antialcohol organizations experienced a new lease on life in the 1860s and 1870s. New organizations were formed, and more important, many of the major Protestant churches rallied to the cause. The Church of England Temperance Society, formed in 1863, became the largest organization of its kind by the end of the century, when it had 7,000 branches and between 150,000 and 200,000 subscribing members.18
With other organizations, it pressured the government to enact restrictive policies on alcohol, particularly as it affected children, who until then had been able to obtain alcohol as easily as adults. A series of laws in the last decades of the nineteenth century moved toward establishing a minimum legal drinking age, a common feature of modern alcohol policies. In 1872, children under the age of sixteen were prohibited from purchasing spirits at a public house for consumption on the premises, and in 1886 children under thirteen were prohibited from buying ale for consumption in a public house. But in both cases children could purchase alcohol for consumption elsewhere. Working-class parents often sent their children to buy drinks for them, but there was growing fear that this provided a loophole that allowed children to drink at will. One observer of taverns in Edinburgh noted that “children, sent with jugs for liquor, seemed to enjoy sipping it after emerging from the public house.”19 In response to such concerns, a 1901 Child Messenger Act forbade the sale of beer or spirits to a child under age fourteen unless the alcohol was in a sealed bottle.
Legal reforms like these were part of a contemporary trend to protect children, and the antialcohol movements dedicated much of their energy to educating children about the dangers of alcohol before drink got them in its clutches. In Hull (Yorkshire), temperance workers organized an essay competition among elementary school students on the theme “Physical Deterioration and Alcoholism.” The essays produced insights such as the following: “To-day, many people are in jail for committing suicide, while under the influence of drink”; “Seafaring men who are in the habit of drinking are liable to collide with other vessels”; and “Before so much alcohol was taken, the British were sturdy, strong, square-shouldered men. But what do you see at the present day? Thin, puny, round-shouldered men.”20
Reformers saw children affected by alcohol in several ways. First, many unplanned births were said to result from women drinking and allowing men to take advantage of them—a process described pithily by one author as combining “brutality, female degradation, and reckless prodigality.”21 Second, drinking habits were passed from generation to generation, although one author noted that “happily, drunkenness is a direct cause of sterility.”22 Third, children (and their mothers) often suffered neglect and pauperization, as men squandered on alcohol the money that was needed for shelter and food. Protecting the family was central to antialcohol discourses everywhere, from Europe to North America and beyond.23
Alcohol was said to have ruined what should have been many joyous family occasions. One series of illustrations portrayed the way alcohol spoiled Christmas, a festival coming into its own in the later 1800s. The “Drunkard’s Christmas” showed a bar scene with men drinking, sleeping, and being sick. One was clearly a father, and his children cowered under the bar counter. An accompanying verse read,
Behold the effects of intemperance here,
No comfort at this happy time of the year;
For the little children no pudding, no play,
And no home but the pot-house on dear Christmas-day.
In contrast was the “Teetotaller’s Christmas,” a scene of a happy family with lots of food, the children also on the floor, but here gazing greedily at plates laden with pies.
By industry and temperance the board is well-spread
With a nice furnished home o’er the family’s head;
Here is plenty and peace, such as all men may win,
With a blessing from God, by refraining from gin.24
Antialcohol movements elsewhere adopted different strategies. In France the temperance movement did not get under way, in any serious sense, until after the French defeat by the Prussians in 1870—a defeat attributed to, among other things, a weakening of the population (and young men of military age in particular) by the consumption of distilled spirits. Until that point, leading French political and other commentators insisted that, unlike the United States and Great Britain, France did not have a drinking problem because its people drank wine, a healthy beverage. In 1853 the Académie Française confidently asserted that “France has many drunkards but, happily, no alcoholics.”25 Drunkenness in itself was not perceived as a problem, as apologists argued that there was a particular kind of French drunk, not boorish and violent like drunks of other nationalities, but one that was witty, vivacious, and intelligent.
This set the tone for the temperance movement in France, which focused on spirits but supported the drinking of wine and beer. They and other fruit-based alcoholic beverages had, after all, been consumed in France for centuries without the country encountering problems. The disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian War had to be attributable to distilled spirits made from grain and sugar beets that were becoming increasingly popular as working-class drinks. By the 1890s, absinthe had displaced beer and brandy to become, after wine, the most popular drink in Paris.26
A temperance campaign, led by the Société française de tempérance from the early 1870s, called for the French to abstain from “industrial” alcohols such as brandy, absinthe, and other grain-based spirits and to drink instead unadulterated wine. The message could hardly have been timed worse. Just as it got under way, France’s vineyards were being struck by phylloxera, and wine production began to plummet (See Chapter 9). To meet consumer demand, producers throughout France began to tamper with their wine, sometimes blending it with wines from Spain or Algeria and sometimes making wine from raisins instead of fresh grapes. But there were still shortages, and many wine-drinkers turned to distilled spirits. The temperance attack on spirits was further weakened when French scientists began to argue that alcohol was alcohol, whether it was consumed as wine, beer, or spirits, and that above certain volumes it was as dangerous.
This argument undermined the privileged position of wine and made nonsense of the notion that consuming unlimited amounts of wine was alright but that drinking any spirits at all was harmful. But there were still some scientists, as late as the 1890s, willing to differentiate among alcohols. A prominent Belgian physician declared that there were eight different kinds of alcohol, of which only one was innocuous: “Pure beer and pure wine consist of this good alcohol; but all spirits, unless properly rectified, contain the most deadly poisons.”27
As French temperance organizations faltered, they were replaced in 1895 by a new body, the French Anti-Alcohol League (Union française antialcoolique, or UFA), which adopted a program calling for total abstinence, including from wine. It faced a formidable task, for at the turn of the century France had one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption in the world. At 15.9 liters of pure alcohol per capita, it was almost twice the rate in Great Britain (8.2 liters) and three times the rate in the United States and Russia (5.8 liters and 5.2 liters, respectively). The UFA hoped to become a mass organization and appealed in particular to women, whom it portrayed as the most common victims of alcoholic and heavy-drinking men. But it faced stiff opposition, not only from the alcohol industry but also from many physicians who persisted in promoting the health benefits of wine. One advertisement, endorsed by several professors of medicine, claimed that a liter of wine had the nutritional value of 900 centiliters of milk, 370 grams of bread, 585 grams of good (deboned) meat, and 5 eggs. It carried the statement by Jacques Bertillon, an eminent French demographer, that “alcoholism is held in check by the consumption of wine.”28
Even the government, concerned for the economic impact if France’s alcohol industries (especially the wine industry) were to shut down, weighed in against any attempt to reduce wine consumption. Wine was France’s fourth-biggest export, 1.5 million people were grape-growers, and almost 10 percent of the total population was involved in some aspect of the wine industry.29 Many more people were employed in the brewing and distilling industries. The finance minister stated that France was “not rich enough to fight alcohol,” and the National Assembly passed a resolution in 1900 declaring wine to be the national beverage of France.30
The defense of wine echoed widely throughout France. One writer denounced abstinence in ringing nationalistic terms: “Young men or sad old men may advocate water as the only healthy drink and hurl anathemas at those who enjoy the pleasures of a glass of old wine or fine cognac. No! In our beautiful France, a country of wine, joy, openness and happy temperament, let us not talk about abstinence. Your water, your Lenten drinks, your Ceylon tea, fig or acorn coffee, your lemonade and camomile, be hanged. You are not only bad hygienists, but bad Frenchmen.” Another sneered that La Croix Bleue, a temperance organization active in France but based in Switzerland, was represented by “Geneva clergymen with high collars and skin yellowed from not drinking wine.”31La Croix Bleue merged with the Société française de tempérance in 1903 to promote a common message that stressed moderate consumption of beer, wine, and cider. This platform was more successful than calls for abstention, and the organization was supported by the French government, which allowed it to set up education programs in the army and in schools. It campaigned hard against spirits, however, especially against absinthe, and was influential in having it banned in 1915, soon after the First World War began.
In Germany, temperance movements were more active in the predominantly Protestant north than in the Catholic south, and as in France, they focused on distilled spirits rather than on beer or wine. In the mid-nineteenth century, the consumption of spirits increased at the expense of beer, particularly in the north and northeast but also, though to a lesser extent, in the south. Temperance campaigners argued that the ready availability of cheap Schnapps (spirits made from grain or potatoes) led to criminality, godlessness, and immorality. By 1846 there were more than 1,200 local temperance organizations, often led by Protestant pastors, and most were in the rural areas of northern and eastern Germany and in Prussia’s Polish districts. Tens of thousands of men are said to have taken the temperance pledge.32 They had little impact, and temperance did not enter political debate until the 1880s, when Germany entered a phase of rapid industrialization. In 1883 the German Association for the Prevention of Alcohol Abuse was formed, and it argued for the drinking of beer rather than Schnapps and the banning of Schnapps (a Schnappsboykott) from factories. As in France, the temperance message was undermined by the scientific discovery that all alcoholic beverages were harmful if consumed in sufficient quantities, and organizations favoring total abstinence came to the fore. Some seventy of them merged into a powerful association that pressed the government to adopt policies such as local option (giving municipalities, which were more vulnerable to lobbying, the power to restrict the sale of alcohol within their jurisdictions) and the compulsory sterilization of alcoholics.
By the time the abstinence movement got under way in Germany in the 1880s, alcohol consumption had begun to fall; it peaked in the early 1870s, when Germans consumed 10.2 liters of pure alcohol in almost equal volumes of Schnapps and beer. From that time, the consumption of beer rose while the consumption of the higher-alcohol Schnapps fell steadily. Even so, the place of all alcoholic beverages in the German diet seems to have declined by the turn of the century. Between 1896 and 1910 there were transformative changes in the German diet. It became more diversified, and products like fruit, sugar, and rice became much more widely consumed. On a per capita basis, tropical fruit consumption rose 92 percent, consumption of fruit rose 67 percent, and consumption of sugar rose 52 percent. Rice, fish, and eggs also made big gains. In contrast, more traditional foods, such as potatoes (down 25 percent), were less represented on German tables, as were Schnapps (down 24 percent) and even beer, which declined by 8 percent.33 The decline in Germans’ potato consumption occurred just as potato yields were rising, and increasing proportions of the harvest were converted into spirits when high-volume, steam-powered distilleries came online. At the same time, consumer drinking preferences in Europe shifted from potato- to grain-based spirits, leaving producers to look for new markets. They found them in the African colonies where, from the late 1800s, German spirits were the source of most of the cheap alcohol used by Europeans as a trading commodity.34
The temperance message also found its way into Japan, not coincidentally about the same time that European alcohol began to make an impact on Japanese drinking patterns. The commercial production of beer in Japan—based on German practices and styles—began in the 1870s, and by the 1890s it had won a substantial part of the domestic market: imports of foreign beer fell from more than 611 kiloliters in 1890 to 100 kiloliters in 1900. At the same time, imports of wines and spirits rose and remained robust.35 The first beer-hall opened in Tokyo in 1899, and soon beer was being served in beer-gardens, restaurants, and teahouses. But for the most part, consumption was confined to the better-off, and there were few complaints about excessive drinking. All one Western resident of Tokyo could complain about was that although “the Japanese had not required much instruction in the art of beer-drinking . . . he does not, however, quite understand yet how to handle his beer, and frequently allows it to get too hot in summer and too cold in winter.”36
Western temperance activities began in Japan about the same time as beer production, and the first branch of the WCTU opened there in 1886. Westerners played prominent roles in the WCTU and other Japanese temperance organizations as they campaigned against not only alcohol but also prostitution. WCTU books aimed at young readers, such as Health for Little Folks, were translated into Japanese, but although they were used in mission schools, they made little headway in public and private schools.37 Overall, the temperance movement had little discernible impact on patterns of drinking and on government alcohol policies in Japan. Temperance was not necessarily an ideology alien to Japan; but the WCTU was resolutely Christian in its approach, and the authorities were not impressed by activities such as the WCTU’s sending copies of the Bible to soldiers fighting in Japan’s early twentieth-century wars with China and Russia.
The WCTU’s frustration in Japan contrasted with the successes of the antialcohol movements in Western countries, where the drink issue began to appear on the policy agendas of local, regional, and national governments. Yet it is important to appreciate the broader social and cultural conditions that gave traction to the drive for changes in alcohol policy. Through the nineteenth century, anxiety grew about the moral state and cultural directions of Western societies. As we have seen (Chapter 9), industrialization created a mass working class and drew huge populations of poor workers to lives of hardship in the crowded new cities. There, middle-class observers began to express concern about the ever-larger working class, which they perceived as a threat to moral and social stability. Everything in the cultures of the urban working class and the poor seemed to run against the expressed ideals of the burgeoning middle class, which stressed restraint and self-discipline, religious piety, moderation in all things, sobriety, and the values of family life. Workers were boisterous in their leisure activities, whether playing football in the city streets or drinking inside and outside taverns. Men and women were as likely to cohabit as to marry, and urban illegitimacy rates rose during the nineteenth century. Workers were less likely than members of the middle class to attend church.
All of these tendencies looked threatening to the social and moral order, and whereas a more religious age might simply have looked to the devil as the cause, nineteenth-century observers focused on alcohol—although for many religious commentators this might be a fine distinction, as they argued that alcohol was simply the devil’s weapon of choice. Alcohol led drinkers to lose control of their minds and bodies, and they made irrational decisions that led them to embrace poverty, indolence, crime, immorality, and impiety. Stop the consumption of alcohol, the argument went, and you would solve most of the problems that bedeviled workers and the poor and that threatened social stability. As Richard Cobden, the English reformer, put it, “The temperance cause lies at the foundation of all social and political reform.”38
One of the responses to the perceived degeneration of Western populations was the eugenics movement, which professed to take a scientific approach to issues of heredity. There were several schools of thought within the movement, but their common principle was that people with inherited physical, emotional, or intellectual disabilities should, for the good of the general population, refrain from reproducing. As with the antialcohol movement, some eugenicists believed that the decision not to reproduce ought to be voluntary, while some adopted a coercive approach and advocated compulsory sterilization.
Among the hereditary disabilities—including epilepsy, blindness, and what was called “feeble-mindedness”—identified by many eugenicists were patterns of persistent or heavy alcohol consumption, usually referred to generically at the time as “alcoholism.” Insofar as undesirable alcohol behavior was transmitted from generation to generation, heavy drinkers could be shown to be threats to the health of any population, or to “the race,” as white Europeans were often called.
Eugenics became closely connected to nationalism and militarism, both of which intensified in Europe during the late 1800s. The antialcohol campaign fed into both by means of eugenics theories insofar as alcohol was seen as a threat to military efficiency and national strength. The campaign against drink often adopted military metaphors. The United Brothers of Temperance in the United States referred to their members as “effective soldiers” in the “battle” against alcohol and pointed out that “no country can with safety rely on raw recruits alone.” In the United States, many temperance rallies took place on Independence Day, and the republican mood already in the air was heightened by references to “the war . . . against the hosts of King Alcohol.”39 Americans had defeated one king to win their independence, and they would overcome the next to attain their freedom from drink.
In this period of international tensions and increasing military preparation, considerable attention was paid to the effects of alcohol on the fitness of men for military service, and there was a vigorous debate on the provision of alcohol to European armed forces. Even Turkish soldiers, seldom held up by the British as models of military efficiency, were praised for their abstinence from alcohol, although their officers were said to be “not so free of this pernicious habit.”40 Numerous surveys of military efficiency purported to show the advantages of alcohol-free troops. Statistics from one British regiment in India during the 1860s showed that as policy shifted from allowing alcohol freely to restricting its availability and finally banning it altogether, the annual number of cases of drunkenness fell from thirty-four to seven and courts-martial declined from six to zero.41 On the impressionistic side, one British naval officer reported to a parliamentary committee that “during the [Crimean] war, almost every accident that I ever witnessed on board ship was owing to drunkenness. Drink was more dangerous than gunpowder.”42
Spirits, notably rum and brandy, had been provided to soldiers and sailors not to hydrate them (the amounts were too small for that, even when the spirits were diluted with water) but because spirits were considered beneficial to health. If there was a shift in this position on the part of the military authorities, it reflected a general decline in the belief that alcohol had therapeutic properties. For thousands of years, physicians had recommended moderate intakes of alcohol—first wine and beer and, later, spirits—as beneficial to health, and they had prescribed specific forms and quantities for specific ailments. Many early advocates of temperance were medical men who yet believed in the therapeutic value of fermented drinks. The famous temperance barometer devised by Dr. Benjamin Rush allowed that beer and wine, consumed in moderation and with food, were healthy, and Rush himself invested in a vineyard property.
The use of alcohol as therapy by doctors seems to have declined somewhat by the early twentieth century. In London hospitals, for example, spending on alcohol declined by between 50 and 90 percent between 1884 and 1904.43 The Salisbury Infirmary spent a total of £302 on wine, beer, and spirits in 1865, £142 in 1885, and a mere £18 in 1905.44 These trends might well have reflected advances made in drug therapy in the late 1800s, such as the development of aspirin. Proprietary medicines of this kind could be tested scientifically and shown to be effective. All that could be reasonably claimed of wine and other forms of alcohol was that they generally promoted physical and intellectual well-being or, more specifically, that they were helpful to the digestion. One investigation at Yale University, reported in 1896, showed that small volumes of alcohol (the researchers tried whiskey, brandy, rum, and gin) accelerated digestion and impeded it “only when taken immoderately and in intoxicating quantities.”45 But when doctors wrote of the benefits of a particular wine for a specific ailment or of brandy for some malady, they had difficulty explaining in prevailing scientific terms just how alcohol achieved the results they claimed for it.
The continuing sense that alcohol was generally a good tonic was expressed in a 1903 book on alcohol and mountaineering written by a Swiss doctor. When 1,200 members of alpine clubs responded to a survey on their alcohol consumption, 78 percent replied that they consumed alcohol regularly, and 72 percent claimed that they carried alcohol while climbing, in case of need. Swiss alpine guides believed that white wine was refreshing, red wine was a restorative when a climber began to tire, brandy gave courage, and hot red wine fixed almost all minor illnesses. After making many qualifications about the value of alcohol and suggesting alternatives (such as water, tea, lemonade, fruits, and coffee), the author concluded that alcohol might be useful as a restorative, but only when it was taken in moderation and when it was really necessary.46
Many doctors, and not only those in Europe, continued to believe that alcoholic beverages definitely had a place in medical treatment. At the turn of the century, the WCTU was involved in a debate with medical researchers over its claims for the health benefits of total abstinence.47 A 1921 survey of 53,900 randomly selected physicians in the United States showed that 51 percent were in favor of prescribing whiskey for certain ailments, 26 percent thought that beer was therapeutic, and a small percentage argued for wine. Then there were the various “medicinal” wines infused with various substances. One was Triner’s American Elixir of Bitter Wine, which was sold in the United States at the turn of the century. It was primarily a laxative made of “red wine and medicinal herbs” to deal with the constipation “that is a common occurrence in our families.” Not only were the herbs a “scientific combination” whose efficacy was undeniable, but the red wine “strengthens the intestines and regulates their work. It also increases the appetite, stimulates and strengthens the body.”48
The debate about the health-giving properties of alcohol was complicated by the belief that much of it, especially distilled spirits, was adulterated to the point of being an even greater risk to health than the antialcohol movements argued that it was in its pure state. Anxiety about the adulteration of food and drink has a long a history, but developments in analytical chemistry in the 1800s allowed for greater precision in determining the presence of harmful additives. It was often alleged that strychnine instead of hops was commonly added to ale in order to provide bitterness, an allegation denied by English brewers.49 Even so, most beers analyzed in one English sample in the mid-1800s were found to be unacceptably adulterated in some way.50 As for wines and spirits, there seemed to be no end of substances that could be employed to impart color, body, or flavor. An American report warned that adulteration was common everywhere and claimed that if all imported alcoholic beverages were pure, the “quantity would be a mere item compared to the amount now drunk in this country.” According to the author, New York City annually sold three times as much “pure, imported brandy” and four times as much “pure imported wine” as all producing countries exported. Some 12 million bottles of “champagne” were sold each year in the United States alone, more than the total champagne exports of 10 million bottles.51
One form of adulteration was the widespread practice of adding plaster (gypsum or calcium sulfate) to wine. Plaster improved acidity and therefore acted as a preservative, and it also gave wine a brighter and clearer color. It was particularly common in the mass-produced wines of southern France, Italy, and Spain, which were frequently shipped long distances to their markets and benefited from the preservative qualities of plaster. But plaster found its way into many “quality” wines in the 1880s, as Bordeaux producers blended these plastered wines with their own to make up for losses due to phylloxera. (At the end of the 1880s, twice as much Bordeaux wine was in circulation as was produced in the region.)
Plastering was widely debated in the second half of the 1800s, with various committees and scientists unable to agree on its harmfulness despite reports of illnesses following the consumption of plastered wines. In 1857, people who drank plastered wine in Aveyron, in southern France, were reported to have experienced “unquenchable thirst and an insupportable dryness of the throat” as well as lesions.52 French legislators decided that 2 grams of plaster per liter of wine posed no threat to health, but there were complaints that winemakers simply tossed handfuls of plaster into the fermentation vats without bothering to weigh it. From 1880 to 1891, the most intense period of the phylloxera crisis, even the regulation dictating a maximum of 2 grams was suspended because of the shortage of wine.
Some forms of adulteration, such as the addition of water, were clearly harmless and might actually have made alcoholic drinks more healthy by reducing their alcohol content. Similarly, using grapes grown in one region to make wine labeled by a different region—Bordeaux merchants often included grapes from Spain and the Rhône Valley in their wines, especially when their own production was reduced by phylloxera—was not a danger to health. But such practices caused more and more concern as authorities groped their way toward an appellation system that would tie wines to demarcated regions and give consumers more certainty as to the provenance of what they were buying.
But even practices that were not harmful to health—like diluting wine and blending foreign and regionally labeled wines—were increasingly considered inappropriate alterations to drinks. They were often treated the same way as the addition of sugar (chaptalization) to raise the alcohol level in wine, the addition of coloring agents, and the use of plaster. The authorities appeared to be as concerned about what are now called consumer rights as they were about consumer health. Consumers who purchased alcohol, it was argued, were entitled to certain expectations, including the expectation that wine did not contain added water or plaster. When one member of the French Chamber of Deputies declared, in a debate on adulteration, that such alcohols were “poisons” that “filled up the insane asylums,” the minister of agriculture responded, “We are discussing a law on fraud, not a law on public health. . . . At the same time, I would be pleased if certain provisions of the bill could fight against fraud and also protect public health.”53
Antialcohol campaigners were not worried about the consumer fraud implied by adulteration. But they exploited it to show that drinkers not only took risks by drinking alcoholic beverages when they were pure but incurred even greater risks by consuming drinks that were likely contaminated by deadly substances. Some doctors insisted that, adulterated or not, “alcohol has a direct tendency to cause death.”54 This was not a novel claim, but by the late nineteenth century, allegations such as these were often backed by statistics—often spurious statistics, but statistics, nonetheless. During the 1800s, governments and institutions had begun to compile social statistics systematically for a wide range of purposes, and no group exploited them more eagerly than campaigners against drink. Mortality statistics were an obvious target, for there was no more cogent argument against alcohol than that it killed. Not only causes of death were at play here, but also the exposure of certain occupations to alcohol. In the early 1900s, for example, English innkeepers and inn workers had mortality rates higher than those of lead workers and two to three times greater than the rates for coal miners.55
As they were presented, the figures seemed to bear out claims that alcohol was ravaging peoples and societies, although the statistics varied from source to source. One blamed alcohol for four-fifths of all crime, two-thirds of all poverty, half of all suicides, two-thirds of all madness, and nine-tenths of all shipwrecks, as well as “idleness, Sabbath-breaking, lying, swearing, uncleanness, accidents, etc.”56 Another author gave different estimates: alcohol caused three-quarters of crime, nine-tenths of poverty, a third of suicides, a third of insanity, a third of shipwrecks, and also half of all disease and three-quarters of all “juvenile depravity.”57 Clearly we are in the realm of impressionism rather than any serious statistical analysis, but readers might well have taken such assertions at face value (and even the lower of the two sets of figures would be alarming).
From time to time, more reliable statistics emerged. In contrast to claims that alcohol was responsible for a third to two-thirds of insanity, statistics collected by individual asylums showed a less frequent relationship. The Royal Asylum in Edinburgh reported that in the early 1870s, “intemperance” was an assigned cause of insanity in 13 percent of admissions and 20 percent of cases where the cause of insanity was known. Most other asylums in Britain reported that alcohol was related to insanity in less than 10 percent of admissions.58 These figures were low in comparison with the rates of about 25 percent reported by a large asylum in Paris, but even that is far from the figures of a third or two-thirds that were often bandied about by antialcohol campaigners.59 The statistical revolution of the nineteenth century might well have given statistics status and credibility in political discourses, and antialcohol writers enthusiastically embraced them.
The medical profession had not turned entirely from alcohol, but alcohol was no longer unquestioned as having therapeutic value and could, instead, generate its own illness: alcoholism. This is a condition that has many definitions, but it generally refers to an addiction to alcohol, usually manifested in persistent and heavy drinking of a pathological kind. The term was first used by a Swedish physician, Magnus Huss, in 1849 to describe a condition where regular and heavy consumption of alcohol led to adverse effects that interfered with an individual’s ability to manage his or her personal and work lives. Alcoholism was defined as a “disease of the will,” in that it sprang from a deficit of the will and required the patient to apply his or her will in order to cure it. At the end of the nineteenth century, most people diagnosed as alcoholic belonged to social groups believed to have little willpower or self-discipline: the poor of both sexes and middle- and upper-class women.60 In France, a physician suggested that the will of workers was impaired by the nature and conditions of their work, their housing conditions, their diet, and their income. He suggested that the solution to drinking problems lay in broad social reforms.61
Alcoholism was and has remained a concept with uncertain contours and boundaries, for it is not clear that all regular and heavy drinkers can be classified as alcoholics. Among the ongoing discussions about alcoholism are whether it is a disease and whether it is curable or merely treatable.62 These issues engaged some temperance and prohibition supporters in the nineteenth century, but for the most part, antialcohol writers seized on the word once it had been coined and applied it to almost anyone who drank daily or who seemed to drink above average volumes of alcohol. Surprisingly, overuse of the term and a tendency to stretch its definition did not weaken its force. Many antialcohol organizations that set out to combat alcohol abuse did so by referring to it as alcoholism.
If confidence in the health-giving properties of alcoholic beverages declined during the nineteenth century, the same can be said of the religious significance of wine, as growing antipathy toward alcoholic beverages called into question its use in Christian communion services. The fact that wine had for nearly 2,000 years been central to Christian imagery and ritual posed a major problem to advocates of complete abstinence from alcoholic beverages. Some temperance campaigners could accommodate a periodic sip of sacramental wine, but even they had to contend with the notion that wine, a “soft” alcohol in comparison to spirits, might be a gateway to harder varieties.
Hard-core abstaining Christians, however, were appalled at the suggestion that their God might have blessed any form of alcohol and that Christ’s blood was represented by an intoxicating beverage that was intrinsically evil and responsible for widespread misery and immorality. They developed an imaginative theology of enology, the two-wine theory, according to which the biblical references to “wine” involve two distinct beverages. The first, “good wine,” was grape juice (often referred to in antialcohol literature as “unfermented wine,” an oxymoron); this, they said, was the beverage that Christ created from water at the marriage of Cana and that the disciples consumed at the Last Supper. The second beverage, “bad wine,” was real, fermented, alcoholic, intoxicating wine.63 It was this beverage that Noah consumed to the point of inebriation and that Lot’s daughters plied their father with so that they could have intercourse with him. In other words, when “wine” was associated with good things in the Bible, it was grape juice, but when “wine” was associated with immorality, it was wine.
As they felt it would be blasphemous to represent Christ by wine, teetotalers began a campaign to persuade churches to replace communion wine with grape juice. A structural development assisted the teetotalers in this endeavor. Louis Pasteur and other scientists who carried out research on fermentation discovered that heating up grape juice (the process later known as pasteurization) killed off the yeasts needed to turn its sugars into alcohol. This enabled the production of a stable juice that was free from the risk of fermentation. Grape juice was soon in commercial production, and church authorities were urged to buy this “unfermented wine” for use in communion.
The campaign had scattered successes in the United States, where the Methodist Episcopal Church adopted grape juice in 1880. An influential Methodist theologian argued that grape juice was an “emblem of mercy and salvation” and a “symbol of blessing and life,” while wine was “pronounced a poison both by Scripture and science.”64 On the other hand, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) used wine in communion from the 1830s and even owned vineyards to make their own wine. Later in the century, congregations bypassed grape juice and opted for water in their communion services, and water became the rule for Mormons in 1912. In England the Anglican Church resisted all attempts to replace wine with juice.65 The Catholic Church, which was only marginally involved in the nineteenth-century campaigns against alcohol, continued to use wine.
Pasteurized fruit juices were a new addition to the nonalcoholic beverages available in the later nineteenth century. They joined hot beverages, such as coffee, tea, and chocolate, and most important of all, water. As these drinks became more widely consumed, and as fresh, potable water was made available to people in Europe and North America, the cultural meaning of alcohol was permanently changed. The consumption of alcoholic beverages for recreational purposes was, by the nineteenth century, deeply embedded in the cultures of Western societies. But historically they also had a parallel and primary dietary purpose as beverages safer than the existing sources of drinking water. That was still true in many places at the beginning of the 1800s, and it is clear that campaigns to reduce alcohol consumption—and especially to eliminate it entirely—could make no progress until alternative beverages were available.
Coffee and tea, which had been introduced to Europe and North America in the seventeenth century, were widely consumed by the nineteenth century. Both could be considered alternatives to alcohol for the purpose of hydration; even though tea is a diuretic, its overall effective is to hydrate. Because both coffee and tea called for boiled or almost-boiled water, they were safer ways of drinking the water that was used in their preparation. The consumption of both of these hot beverages increased during the nineteenth century and permeated all levels of society in some countries. Tea became especially popular in Great Britain (where per capita consumption more than doubled between 1850 and 1875) and its colonies and in Russia, while coffee was dominant in France, Italy, and North America. For all that, safe water supplies were necessary before an alcohol-free society could realistically be contemplated and advocated. An English physician noted this in 1898: “The first thing a teetotaler requires . . . is pure water.”66 Who would give up the safety of beer or wine to drink water that smelled and tasted bad and was believed to make its consumers sick? It is surely no coincidence, then, that at the very time the antialcohol campaigns hit their stride, serious efforts were made to ensure that Europeans and North Americans had access to regular supplies of potable water. As we have seen, potable water began to be provided to the populations of cities and towns in Europe, North America, and elsewhere from the second third of the nineteenth century, and by the outbreak of the First World War, the bulk of urban inhabitants had access to safe water, piped directly either to their homes or to public fountains.
The two trends were not driven by the same pressures. Opposition to alcohol emerged from an interpretation of deteriorating social conditions and their causes, but the concern about water resulted from the growth of cities and the increasing threat of epidemic disease. Deadly outbreaks of cholera and dysentery in many parts of the Western world in the 1830s and 1850s concentrated the attention of urban authorities everywhere on the need to provide the populations with secure water supplies for drinking and washing. Few alcohol-drinkers were likely to be swayed toward abstinence by the simple provision of good drinking water, but on the other hand, the absence of safe water supplies could be used as an argument in favor of the continued consumption of alcohol. Until safe water was in good and regular supply, the abstinence argument was bound to gather little popular traction. But once it could no longer be argued that alcohol was necessary for health and dietary reasons, alcohol could be viewed as an exclusively recreational drink, a discretionary beverage that could be given up without harm. Indeed, the centuries-old argument that alcohol was a healthier choice than water could be—and was—turned on its head: from the middle of the nineteenth century, water could be portrayed as the safe choice, and alcohol could be condemned as harmful. Water had been merely dangerous to the health of its consumers, but alcohol could be depicted as harmful to society and morality as well.
In short, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antialcohol movements must be understood in broad cultural and material contexts. A number of trends undermined positive attitudes toward the medicinal and religious associations of alcohol, class distinctions created anxieties about drinking by the masses, and sensibilities concerning women, children, and the family sharpened concerns about male drunkenness. Nationalism and eugenics added their own dimensions. Meanwhile, the availability of alternative, nonalcoholic beverages was the necessary material underpinning to the transformation of alcohol from a necessary and desirable part of the diet to a discretionary commodity. This shift in the cultural meaning of alcohol was one of the most important events in the history of alcohol for a thousand years, and it reframed attitudes and alcohol policies in the twentieth century.