The Far-Reaching Legacy of the American Temperance Movement

The American Temperance Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is often depicted as a backwards, extremist movement of teetotaling fundamentalists. In fact, when we think of anti-drink evangelicals during this era, we might imagine a group of disapproving women from the local anti-saloon league picketing outside of a bar or scolding a crowd of drunken sailors. But the temperance movement was so much more than angry protests, and it breathed life to many other evangelical reform causes. In many ways, temperance was the mother of reform. Although other reform campaigns might have predated temperance, none cast such a wide net of influence throughout American history.

Abolitionists who shaped the national conversation over slavery in the antebellum period got their start on the temperance circuit. William Lloyd Garrison, the most famous abolitionist in America and the editor of the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, was initially a temperance lecturer. Manual labor colleges and western universities were inspired by temperance advocates. Before Theodore Dwight Weld rounded up his famous “seventy” abolitionists for the American Ant-Slavery Society or was employed by the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, he preached the temperance gospel while at the Oneida Institute in western New York.

Dietary reform itself grew out of the temperance movement. After all, so the thinking went, if intemperance was a sin, so was over-eating and gluttony. Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister who led the health reform movement (and invented the Graham cracker), began as a temperance advocate and a staunch opponent of tobacco.

The women’s rights movement even sprang from temperance societies where women were often given a more prominent role in the great “benevolent empire.” On the eve of Prohibition, women like Cettie Rockefeller, the wife of John, and the daughter of abolitionists who helped runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad (but would never cook on the Sabbath - even for slaves) was herself a conservative evangelical who promoted causes like women’s education, public education, dietary reform, and most of all, temperance. Cettie refused to attend her son's wedding reception because they served alcohol!

John D. Rockefeller himself was a fiery temperance stalwart who preached to his Sunday school class, “you know how I never got drunk? I never took the first drink.” Rockefeller often attributed his business success to moral principles like moderation, thrift, and abstinence.

The grandfather of the temperance movement was indeed Lyman Beecher, who got his start in reform by preaching against the national menace of dueling, which was far more common in the early United States than we often realize. Beecher founded the American Temperance Society in 1826, and he was catapulted to national fame when he published Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance (1827). But Beecher was not just a temperance advocate. He moved his entire family to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1832 to become the inaugural president of upstart Lane Seminary, a beacon of education in the American West. Beecher became an education reformer, as did his eldest daughter, Catharine Beecher. The Beecher family itself was devoted to an entire litany of causes, most of all abolition.

Although we might be tempted to stereotype the temperance movement of a century or two ago, temperance advocates quite literally changed the course of American history.