Americans in the early nineteenth century quaffed alcohol in prodigious quantities. In 1825, the average American over ?fteen years of age consumed seven gallons of alcohol a year, mostly in the form of whiskey and hard cider. (The corresponding ?gure at the start of the twenty-?rst century was less than two gallons, most of it from beer and wine.) Workers typically took a midmorning break and a mid-afternoon break, both accompanied by alcohol, as well as liquor with every meal. To entertain guests meant to ply them with several kinds of alcohol until some fell down. All social classes drank heavily; college students, journeyman printers, agricultural laborers, and canal-diggers were especially notorious. Schoolchildren might face an inebriated teacher in the classroom. Although socially tolerated, drunkenness frequently generated violence, especially domestic violence, and other illegal behavior. In such a society, intemperance represented a serious issue of public health, comparable to the problems of drug abuse experienced in later generations.
Making temperance a Christian cause constituted an innovation, for traditional Christianity had not discouraged drinking. Indeed, Beecher recalled, ministerial conferences during his youth had been occasions for heavy convivial drinking. Unlike a later generation of crusaders, Beecher never thought the legal prohibition of alcohol a practical solution; he relied purely on changing public attitudes. This was no mean feat. To take stand against the strong social pressures to drink took real courage, especially for young men. To help them, temperance workers paid reformed alcoholics to go on speaking tours, published temperance tracts, put on temperance plays, and drove the “water wagon” through towns encouraging converts to jump on. Publicists and organizers like Beecher struck a nerve with the public. The temperance cause resonated among people in all walks of life, rural and urban, white and black. Although it began in the Northeast, temperance reached the South and West and exerted powerful and lasting in?uence there.” At ?rst the temperance advocates restricted themselves to encouraging moderation (hence the name “temperance”); in this phase they condemned only distilled liquors, not beer and wine. At the grassroots level, however, it became apparent that total abstinence made a more effective appeal. Beecher endorsed this shift in Six Sermons on Intemperance (1825). Those who signed a temperance pledge were encouraged to put a T after their names if willing to take the extra step of pledging total abstinence; from this derives our word “teetotaler.”
The campaign to alter age old habits and attitudes proved amazingly successful: consumption of alcohol, especially of hard liquor, declined steadily and dramatically after 1830, falling to 1.8 gallons per person over fifteen by the late 1840s.
This became the template for American civic associations:
The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, served as a model for other movements. Through such issue-oriented organizations, reformers transcended geographical and denominational limitations to wage nationwide campaigns. The voluntary associations became a conspicuous feature of American society from that time forward. They distributed Bibles and tracts, supported missions foreign and domestic, and addressed such varied social problems as poverty, prostitution, and the abuse of women, children, animals, convicts, and the insane. Most momentous of all their activities would be their crusade against slavery.
These movements led to national organizations, but most of their work was done by local chapters at a local level, T. Greer explains:
This partly reflected the limits of communications technology during the late 19th and early 20th century. It also reflected the broader distribution of political power in American society. More Americans lived in towns and farm communities in those days; school boards, city councils, and township assemblies were also more numerous than they are today, despite the smaller population of that era. City and county governments were responsible for many things now handled by the state and federal governments. So civic organizations would agitate to transform their own communities before trying to enact national reforms. This was the pattern that Prohibition followed. By the time the 21st Amendment was passed, dozens of states and hundreds of smaller political units had already gone dry. It is doubtful that Prohibition would have been possible without the thousand small victories won by local chapters Women’s Christian Temperance Movement before hand. In this environment the most important task of a civic group’s national leaders was to make sure that all of its locations of operation had functioning chapters. Visiting these far flung locations and ensuring that the leaders of each chapter had been properly trained absorbed most of the leadership’s time and attention.
During the 1960s things began to change.
Theda Skocpol discusses this narrowing of civic life:
Back in the 19th century, when Frances Willard was working to build the nationally influential Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she traveled across the country recruiting organizers to found and sustain a nationwide network of local chapters. By contrast, when Marian Wright Edelman was inspired to launch the Children’s Defense Fund, she turned to private foundations for grants and then recruited an expert staff of researchers and lobbyists. And the founder of Common Cause, John Gardner, used a few big donations to set up a mailing-list operation.
To be sure, as the Children’s Defense Fund illustrates, certain kinds of advocacy groups can enlarge our democracy by speaking on behalf of vulnerable citizens who could not otherwise gain voice. Nevertheless, in an associational universe dominated by business organizations and professionally managed groups, the mass participatory and educational functions of classic civic America are not reproduced. Because patron grants and computerized mass mailings generate money more readily than modest dues repeatedly collected from millions of members, and because paid experts are more highly valued than volunteer leaders for the public functions of today’s public-interest groups, the leaders of these groups have little incentive to engage in mass mobilization and no need to share leadership and organizational control with state and local chapters.
In mailing-list organizations, most adherents are seen as consumers who send money to buy a certain brand of public-interest representation.
Since then we’ve seen the rise of social media and hashtag activism.
