Temperance movement

The temperance movement was a social campaign against the drinking of alcohol that grew from small local societies in the early nineteenth century into one of the largest reform movements in the Western world. Strongest in English-speaking, Scandinavian and mainly Protestant countries, it moved from urging moderation to demanding total abstinence and finally legal prohibition, which was adopted for a time in the United States, Canada, Norway, Finland and elsewhere.

Criticism of heavy drinking had older roots. In eighteenth-century Britain, a "gin craze" among the urban poor alarmed the middle classes, and in 1743 John Wesley, founder of Methodism, condemned the liquor trade except where truly necessary. In America, the physician Benjamin Rush argued from the 1790s that excessive drinking caused moral and physical ruin, and Native American activists campaigned from as early as 1737 against the alcohol traded for furs in their communities. The first temperance societies in New England and upstate New York, such as a Massachusetts society formed in 1813, sought moderation rather than abstinence and soon faded.

The movement became national in the United States in the 1820s, fed by the evangelical fervour of the Second Great Awakening. In 1826 the minister Lyman Beecher called drunkenness a "national sin", and the American Temperance Society was founded in Boston, later claiming over 8,000 local groups. From 1829 the Presbyterian minister John Edgar promoted temperance in Ulster, and by the 1830s societies were spreading through Britain, Australia and New Zealand. A stricter creed, teetotalism, demanded abstinence from beer and wine as well as spirits; in Britain it began in Preston in 1833, and in 1838 the Irish priest Theobald Mathew launched a Catholic abstinence society. In 1840 working men in Baltimore founded the Washingtonians, who tried to reform drinkers through shared experience rather than sermons, and in 1842 Abraham Lincoln addressed one of their societies in Springfield, Illinois.

From mid-century campaigners increasingly sought legal bans. Maine passed a full prohibition law in 1851, and other states followed, though organised opposition forced several to weaken or drop them. Methodist and other Protestant churches, the Salvation Army, founded in London in 1864, and fraternal orders such as the Good Templars carried the cause abroad. Women took a leading role: a wave of protests against saloons in Ohio in 1873–1874 led to the founding of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Cleveland in 1874, which under Frances Willard became the largest women's organisation of its day and also championed votes for women. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in Ohio in 1893, became a formidable pressure group, and by 1900 perhaps one American in ten had signed an abstinence pledge.

The First World War brought the movement's greatest victories, as governments restricted drink to save grain and keep workers sober. Russia banned alcohol as part of its war mobilisation, Britain restricted pub opening hours, and Iceland (1915), Norway, Finland and Canadian provinces adopted prohibitions. In the United States, national prohibition took effect in 1920 under the Eighteenth Amendment. These bans proved hard to enforce and encouraged smuggling and crime. Norway repealed its ban in 1926, Finland in 1932, and the United States ended national prohibition on 5 December 1933.

In colonised lands, temperance often merged with nationalist and religious revival. In India, Mahatma Gandhi treated alcohol as a foreign imposition, and some Indian states have kept prohibition since independence. The movement survives today in bodies such as the World Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the International Organisation of Good Templars, though with far less political weight.

Our 1880 and 1914 maps show the United States and the United Kingdom at the height of the movement, and the 1920 and 1930 maps the years when national prohibition was in force in several countries.