in the late 1830s, former antiprohibitionists launched a temperance movement of
their own.
One evening in 1840—in the depths of a devastating economic depression—six
craftsmen were drinking at Chase’s Tavern in Baltimore. More or less as a joke,
they sent one of their number to a nearby temperance lecture. He came back a tee-
totaler and converted the others. They then drew up a total abstinence pledge and promised to devote themselves to the reform of other drinkers. Within months,
from this beginning a national movement had emerged, called the Washington
Temperance Society. With a core membership of men who had opposed temper-
ance in the 1830s, the Washingtonians differed from older temperance societies in several ways. First, they identified themselves as members of the laboring classes.
Second, they were separated from the churches. Although many of them were
churchgoers (usually Methodist or Baptist), many were not, and the Washingtonians avoided religious controversy by avoiding religion. Third, the Washingtonians—at
least those who called themselves True Washingtonians—rejected recourse to poli-
tics and legislation and concentrated instead on the conversion of drinkers through compassion and persuasion. Finally, they welcomed “hopeless” drunkards—who
accounted for about 10 percent of the membership—and hailed them as heroes
when they sobered up.
Temperance
Whig reformers welcomed the Washingtonians at first, but
Schisms
they soon had second thoughts. The nonreligious character
of the movement disturbed those who saw temperance as
an arm of evangelical reform. Previous advocates of temperance had assumed
that sobriety would be accompanied by evangelical decorum. Instead, the meet-
ings, picnics, and parades held by the Washingtonians were continuous with a
popular culture that Whig evangelicals opposed. While the temperance regulars
read pamphlets and listened to lectures by clergymen, lawyers, and doctors, the
Washingtonians enjoyed raucous sing-alongs, comedy routines, barnyard imita-
tions, dramatic skits, and even full-dress minstrel shows geared to temperance
themes. Meetings featured experience speeches by reformed drunkards. Speaking
extemporaneously, they omitted none of the horrors of an alcoholic life—
attempts at suicide, friendships betrayed, fathers and mothers desolated, wives
beaten and abandoned, children dead of starvation. Although Washingtonians
had given up alcohol, their melodramatic tales, street parades, song books, and
minstrel shows—even when presented with a Methodist or Baptist accent—were
not the temperance reformation that Lyman Beecher and the Whigs had had in
mind.
Nowhere did the Washingtonians differ more sharply from the temperance
regulars than in their visions of the reformed life. The Whig reformers tied abstinence to individual ambition and middle-class domesticity. They expected men
who quit drinking to withdraw from the male drinking world and to retreat into
the comfort of the newly feminized middle-class family. Washingtonians, on the
other hand, translated traditional male sociability into sober forms. Moreover,
they called former drinkers back to the responsibilities of traditional fatherhood.
Their experience stories began with the hurt drunkards had caused their wives
The Politics of Alcohol
427
and children and ended with their transformation into dependable providers and
authoritative fathers. While the Whig temperance regulars tried to extend the
ethos of individual ambition and the new middle-class domesticity into society at large, Washingtonians sought to rescue the self-respect and moral authority of
working-class fathers.
The Washington Temperance Society collapsed toward the end of the 1840s,
but its legacy survived. Among former drinkers in the North, it had introduced a
new sense of domestic responsibility and a healthy fear of drunkenness. Consump-
tion of pure alcohol dropped from 1.8 to 1.0 gallons annually in the 1840s. Along the way, the Washingtonians and related groups created a self-consciously
respectable native Protestant working class in American cities.
Ethnicity and
In the 1840s and 1850s, millions of Irish and German im-
Alcohol
migrants poured into neighborhoods recently stirred by
working-class revivals and temperance agitation. The new-
comers had their own time-honored relations to alcohol. The Germans introduced
lager beer to the United States, thus providing a wholesome alternative for Amer-
icans who wished to give up spirits without joining the teetotalers. The Germans
also built old-country beer halls in American cities, complete with sausage counters, oompah bands, group singing, and other family attractions. For their part, the Irish reaffirmed their love of whiskey—a love forged in colonial oppression and in a
culture that accepted trouble with resignation—a love that legitimized levels of
male drunkenness and violence that Americans, particularly the temperance forces, found appalling. (Differences in immigrant drinking were given architectural expression. German beer halls provided seating arrangements for whole families. Irish bars, on the other hand, provided a bar but no tables or chairs. If a drinker had to sit down, they reasoned, it was time for him to go home.)
In the 1850s, native resentment of Catholic immigrants drove thousands of
Baptist and Methodist “respectables” out of the Democratic coalition and into na-
tivist Whig majorities that—beginning with Maine in 1851—established legal pro-
hibition throughout New England, in the middle states, and in the Old Northwest.
Many of these Democrats became part of the North’s Republican majority on the
eve of the Civil War.
The South and
On economic issues, southern state legislatures divided along
Social Reform
the same lines as northern legislatures: Whigs wanted gov-
ernment participation in the economy, Democrats did not.
On social questions, however, southern Whigs and Democrats both opposed mor-
alizing legislation. The South was a rural, conservative region of father-dominated households. Southern voters, Whigs as well as Democrats, perceived attempts at
“social improvement” as intrusive, wrong-headed assaults on the autonomy of
neighborhoods and families.
The southern states enacted school laws and drew up blueprints for state school
systems, but the white South had little need for schools to enforce a common cul-
ture. Moreover, the South had less money and less faith in government. Conse-
quently, southern schools tended to be locally controlled, to be infused with
428