[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]
On a
couple historical and movement lessons from the 400th anniversary of
a foundational law.
As with
many things early 1600s, it’s difficult to find too much specific information
about the groundbreaking temperance law enacted in Virginia on March 5th,
1623. The colony’s first royal governor Francis Wyatt and the recently-established colonial
legislature deemed
that date Temperance Day in an attempt to prohibit, as the law put it,
“public intoxication.” That was just the first public and political step in a
century-long debate in the colony over alcohol and its effects, as traced at
length in Kendra Bonnett’s 1976 PhD dissertation Attitudes toward Drinking and Drunkenness in
Seventeenth-Century Virginia (I’ll admit to having only briefly
skimmed the beginning of that thesis for this post, but it’s linked there for
anyone who wants to read more!). While those specific Virginia and 17th
century contexts are of course important to understanding this law, I want to
use that 1623 moment to introduce a couple key lessons about temperance in
America for this entire weeklong blog series.
For one
thing, it’s crucial to understand how longstanding, widespread, and indeed
foundational American temperance debates have been. Much of the narrative
around this issue links it to early 19th century reform movements,
which were certainly influential and about which I’ll have a lot more to say in
tomorrow’s post. But it’s pretty striking and telling that one of the very
first laws passed in collaboration by two of the first European American
political entities—both Virginia’s royal governor and its colonial legislature
were only four years old at the time—addressed the issues of alcohol,
drunkenness, and temperance. Moreover, while we might expect that the other
principal English colony at the time, Puritan Massachusetts, would enact such a
law—and while the Puritans most definitely had strong
opinions on strong drink, but similarly more in opposition to public
drunkenness than alcohol itself—this took place in the far less overtly
religious (or at least religiously governed) Virginia colony. Clearly the issue
was consuming across the new colonies from their outset.
But it’s
just as important to note what this groundbreaking law specifically did and
didn’t do. The temperance movement is often closely associated in our
collective memories with—if not directly defined by—the goal of prohibition, an
understandable connection given that particular, prominent early 20th
century Constitutional amendment and 13-year period (with which I’ll end the
week’s series). Indeed, the association is so strong that one definition of
“temperance” has come to be “abstinence from strong drink.” But I would argue
that that definition emerged because of the association of the movement with
prohibition, and that another definition—“the quality of moderation or
self-restraint”—is more foundational to the word and movement alike. Virginia’
Temperance Day didn’t ban or even legally restrict alcohol, just “public
intoxication”—a demonstrable lack of moderation or restraint in the consumption
of such drinks. There’s at least a spectrum in play here, and one that would
continue to shape the movement’s goals and laws throughout the subsequent 400
years.
Next temperance
histories tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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