Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Book Review

Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933. By
Thomas R. Pegram. (Chicago: Dee, 1998. xvi, 207 pp. $24.95, isbn
1-56663-208-0.)...

Concern about vice occupies a surprisingly prominent place in the
history of American social reform. While Americans often have been
reluctant to address structural inequalities of race, class, and
gender, reformers have found-and continue to find-it comparatively
easy to blame society's most fundamental problems on moral failings
involving drink, drugs, and deviant sexuality. Typically, those
reformers have insisted that economic uncertainties, family problems,
and unpromising youth have their roots in what John C. Burnham calls
"bad habits."

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alcohol was
the moral reformers' principal target. A volume in the IvanR. Dee
American Ways series, Thomas R. Pegram's Battling Demon Rum offers an
overview of the extensive literature-much of it published in recent
decades-on the American temperance movement. The book is built around
a narrative; its chapters tell the story of temperance reform from
its beginnings in the early nineteenth century through the repeal of
Prohibition, and each chapter explains how and why reform efforts
changed.

This is a complicated story. There were distinct threads in
temperance reform: at various times, temperance campaigns were
dominated by elites, workers, women, and the middle class. In each
case, the reformers' concern about alcohol reflected their interests
in other issues; female temperance advocates, for example, used
temperance as a vehicle to promote women's participation in political
life. Over time, temperance advocates pressed for more extensive
reforms: early calls for moderation in drinking evolved into
promoting abstinence (from distilled liquor, that is, but not beer or
wine), urging voluntary teetotalism, and, eventually, insisting on
prohibiting all access to alcohol. Pegram argues that the reformers'
rhetoric bore little connection to the amounts of alcohol consumed.
The best available data suggest that per capita alcohol consumption
fell markedly during the nineteenth century (although it was
apparently rising again in the years just before the passage of
national Prohibition). But consumption was less important than
context; by the end of the nineteenth century, reformers had focused
their criticism on the saloon, which they depicted as a cesspool of
unsupervised vice for working-class males. The middle-class
Anti-Saloon League played the principal role in engineering
Prohibition's triumph.

Although popularly viewed as a failure, Prohibition had considerable
success. It not only reduced alcohol consumption to its lowest level
in United States history, but it also destroyed the reformers'
principal target-the working-class, all-male saloon. Pegram argues
that Prohibition reshaped the culture of drinking; speakeasies
attracted younger, middle-class males and females. Drinking now
seemed less deviant, even as the Ku Klux Klan's vocal support of
Prohibition-and the heavily publicized rise of gangsterism in the
face of law enforcement's inability to eradicate
bootlegging-tarnished a movement that had traded on its moral
superiority. Again, the social conditions of vice were less important
than the ways temperance advocates and their critics defined the
issues and portrayed policy options. Pegram's book offers a readable,
nuanced interpretation of the shifting definitions of alcohol as a
social problem....

Joel Best
University of Delaware
Newark, Delaware


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