Profits, Power, and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing of America, 1800-1930

561 Pages·1989·1.33 MB·English

by  John J. Rumbarger

Profits, Power, and Prohibition : Alcohol
Reform and the Industrializing of America,
title:
1800-1930 SUNY Series in New Social
Studies On Alcohol and Drugs
author: Rumbarger, John J.
publisher: State University of New York Press
isbn10 | asin: 0887067824
print isbn13: 9780887067822
ebook isbn13: 9780585064574
language: English
Prohibition--United States--History,
subject Temperance--United States--History,
Industrialization--United States--History.
publication date: 1989
lcc: HV5089.R84 1989eb
ddc: 363.4/1/0973
Prohibition--United States--History,
subject: Temperance--United States--History,
Industrialization--United States--History.
Page i
Profits, Power, and Prohibition
Page ii
SUNY Series in New Social Studies on Alcohol and Drugs Harry G.
Levine and Craig Reinarman, editors
Page iii
Profits, Power, and Prohibition
Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing of America,
1800-1930
John J. Rumbarger
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Page iv
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1989 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address State University of New York
Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rumbarger, John J., 1938-
Profits, power, and prohibition: Alcohol reform and the
industrializing of America, 1880-1930 / John J. Rumbarger.
p. cm.(SUNY series in new social studies on alcohol and
drugs)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-88706-782-4. ISBN 0-88706-783-2 (pbk.)
1. Prohibition-United StatesHistory. 2. TemperanceUnited
StatesHistory. 3. United StatesIndustriesHistory. I. Title.
II. Series.
HV5089.R84 1988
363.4'1'0973dc19 88-1884
CIP
Page v
For Janet and Emily Elizabeth
Page vii
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction xvii
Part I The Early Years: The Movement Defines Itself
1800-1870
1. The Social and Ideological Origins of Drink Reform, 3
1800-1836
2. The Politics of Moral Reform: Social Class and 21
Nonpartisanship in the Temperance Movement, 1836-
1860
3. "Practical Temperance": Reorganization of the 42
Temperance Movement, 1865-1870
Page viii
Part II The Middle Years: The Tradition Fails, 1865-1890
4. Ends and Means: Temperance Confronts an Industrial 57
World, 1870-1884
5. The Beginning of Conservative Reaction: Liquor 69
Control and the Critique of the Industrial City, 1880-1890
Part III The Climactic Years: The Emergence and Failure
of Antisaloonism, 1890-1914
6. The Collapse of Third-Party Prohibition and Emergence 83
of Political Antisaloonism, 1890-1900
7. Antisaloonism and Urban Reform, 1890-1915 109
8. Antisaloonism and Industrial Development, 1890-1915 123
Part IV The Reemergence of Prohibition, 1914-1919
9. The Anti-Saloon League of America and the 155
Resurgence of National Prohibition, 1900-1917
10. Denouement: Drink Reform and the American 184
Experience
Epilogue: The Era of Constitutional Prohibition 189
Notes 199
Sources 259
Index 261
Page ix
PREFACE
For more than fifteen years John Rumbarger's manuscript Profits,
Power, and Prohibition has held a reputation as something of an
underground classic to students of nineteenth and early twentieth
century American temperance history. In 1976, for example, I
encountered a graduate student at the Massachusetts Historical
Society who, like me, was researching the temperance movement.
Discussing our mutual interests, my fellow researcher mentioned two
items that he found especially valuable: an article by Herbert Gutman
and Rumbarger's dissertation.
Linking these two names was oddly appropriate. In the late 1960s
Rumbarger and Gutman became friends and through that friendship
Rumbarger first absorbed the works of the British historians,
Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and above all Edward Thompson.
These writers perspectives meshed well with those which Rumbarger
had encountered as a student of Gabriel Kolko and Thomas C.
Cochran. Gutman's work, like Thompson's, stressed the importance of
working-class struggles and culture, and in the 1970s began to reshape
scholarly thinking about American society.
Page x
Rumbarger, on the other hand, concerned himself with similar
questions about America's dominant classes and in particular with
their utopian dream that the temperance reform could help bring about
a perfectly harmonious capitalist social order.
1 In Profits, Power, and Prohibition Rumbarger argues that wealthy
and powerful Americans played critical roles in helping to establish,
support and lead the temperance and prohibition movements, and that
they did so out of their larger efforts to transform America into an
industrial capitalist social order. Fifteen years ago this view of
temperance was still so heretical as to appear unthinkableat least to
some early readers of the manuscript.
The dominant view of temperance at that time had been developed
first by Richard Hofstadter and then expanded by Joseph Gusfield.
This view focused on temperance as an issue of "status politics"
which, as Gusfield has recently explained, they had explicitly
developed "as a concept in opposition to 'class politics.'" In The Age of
Reform Hofstadter had ignored the role of wealthy businessmen in
reform movements. He argued that prohibitionists, like other
reformers, were motivated by concerns about their own social
statusabout whether their way of life dominated America. Prohibition,
Hofstadter maintained, was the product of the "country mind" upset
about the city's way of life and of nativist concerns about the behavior
of immigrants. Prohibitionism "was carried about America,'' he said,
"by the rural-evangelical virus." Hofstadter even went so far as to
suggest that prohibitionism was not part of the Progressive
movement.2
Several historians have pointed out that Hofstadter was wrong about
much of this. From the early nineteenth century on, temperance and
prohibition leadership and ideology was urban, professional, and