History Highlight: Practical Temperance

When I first entered graduate school I was required to take a seminar on nineteenth century American history. My academic interest has almost always been the twentieth century so I struggled to find a topic within the confines of the nineteenth that still worked with my drug and crime interest. With guidance from my professor I decided to do some newspaper research and do a keyword search for drug and drug use. The results were not what I expected. In the last pages of several newspapers (from a variety of states) I found references to rehabilitation services and centers that claimed to ascribe to "practical temperance".

The Cogswell Temperance Fountain
in Washington D.C. 

Temperance is the idea that to be a good and moral person one must abstain from alcohol. A cause that has historically had religious support, it was present in America since the days of the Puritans. However, in the nineteenth century temperance evolved from an idea into a movement. Progressive reformers of this era were alarmed by increased immigration and the affects they were having on society. They began to reform education, health services, and the justice system. The temperance branch of these reformers were interested in persuading Americans away from alcoholic beverages and towards more wholesome beverages. Their first attempts at this including providing Americans with the temperance fountains (otherwise known as the drinking fountain). The concept of these now common objects was to provide free water to Americans in the hope that it would keep them out of the saloons. They were generally funded by temperance groups and located in urban centers. However, these tactics were proving unpopular and unpersuasive.

Temperance activist would then begin a political oriented campaign to elect temperance activists into public offices and use that platform to enact their policies as law. These efforts included the creation of the Prohibition Party and eventually passing the 18th amendment and the Volstead Act. From many modern perspectives, it would appear that American during this last quarter of the nineteenth century was supportive of these policies and ideas. Historians write about temperance with little regard for their opposition. This is where practical temperance comes into the story.

The Keeley Institute and their cure claimed to use science to develop a safe
and effective method of curing alcoholism and drug abuse. Their facilities
required regular exercise, bathing, abstaining from cigarettes. However,
alcohol use was freely permitted on it premises.  

Practical temperance is the idea that alcohol is a beverage with the potential for harm and benefit, that scientific understanding of alcohol can help with the treating of alcohol abuse, and that alcohol should not be made illegal. The proponents of these ideas where mostly doctors and scientists but there was support from politicians and ordinary Americans. Doctors used the tenants of practical temperance to help patients who suffered from alcohol abuse and established clinics and over the counter cures. I even discovered an international chain of rehabilitation centers, the Keeley Institute,  that provided in clinic services and out patient services. These chains and their employees espoused that alcoholism, and drug addictions, should be treated as physical conditions by trained doctors. In fact, many patients and doctors bemoaned the temperance movement for its adherence to a religious view of alcoholism and the failed attempts by priests and pastors to heal alcoholism with spirituality and prayer. In their point of view, temperance was harming those they wanted to help. By denying the ability of science to help alcoholism sufferers and rejecting the idea of alcohol as having medical benefits in certain cases, temperance activists were condemning people to suffer.

Keeley's Golden Cure was available over the
counter making it accessible to patients across
socio-economic divides. 

Temperance activists were aware of these growing resentment against their policies and waged a propaganda war against the practical temperance men (and women). In a song written by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the lyrics warn the audience of the alleged ties of these practical temperance men to judges, lawyers, and the alcohol industry, "He’ll vote for a prohibitory statute, then vote for a judge that’s a whiskey galoot and for an attorney that won’t prosecute, this ‘practical’ temperance man". Temperance activists painted their counterparts as corrupt and deceptive. Their aim was not to help the public but to enslave it even further to the affects of alcohol, so they claimed. Why did they find these practical temperance men so dangerous? Mostly because they spoke against the abolition of alcohol. These practical temperance men stood against temperance because of their belief that alcoholism in it of itself is not evil. Rather the abuse of it was was did harm. Furthermore, they believed that alcohol had plenty of beneficial uses that were worth maintaining its legal status.

These practical temperance men have been ignored from history. The time period is now exclusively dominated by the temperance movement. However, they represent a early form of the medical and public health approach to drug policy that would reappear by the mid twentieth century. Their ideas about how to deal with substance abuse are beneficial to historians and criminologists because of the changing ideas of current drug policy we are seeing today. My goal is to bring them back into the historical discourse because of their progressive innovation in a time where reform was repressive.