Temperance

The first temperance campaign in modern history was mounted by Martin Luther (1483–1546) and his followers as part of the Protestant Reformation, and was directed at the episodic drunkenness of traditional German drinking bouts. It failed, however, and German intellectuals instead came to view unconstrained drinking as a positive, indeed defining, Germanic trait.

Organized temperance societies next appeared in Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century. Although the appearance of such societies derived critical impetus from evangelical Protestantism in both countries, temperance advocacy was by no means limited to evangelicals or to Protestants. By the 1870s, the Church of England had created its own temperance society, and during the same decade in the United States the founding of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union (CTAU) demonstrated Roman Catholic concern with the issue. The CTAU's definition of "temperance" as total abstinence also indicated how far temperance reform had traveled during its first half-century, since early American temperance reformers had first defined only moderation in the use of alcoholic beverages and later abstinence only from distilled spirits as their goal. Many reformers, however, soon moved to appeals for abstinence from all intoxicating beverages and then to a demand for state action to stop liquor sales, or prohibition. By the early twentieth century, movements for prohibition had appeared as well in Britain, in other British settler societies—Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—and in Nordic countries. The prohibition cause peaked during the 1910s and 1920s, when various forms of large-scale prohibition were adopted in Iceland (1915–1922), Finland (1919–1932), Norway (1916–1927), Russia and the Soviet Union (1914–1925), Canadian provinces (varying periods between 1901 and 1948) and by the Canadian federal government (1918–1919), and in the United States (1918–1933). In addition, a majority of voters in New Zealand twice supported prohibition (in 1911 and 1919), but the measure was never enacted. For those nations involved, World War I furnished a crucial stimulus for new restrictions on alcohol sales, such as the Carlisle system, a British scheme for government ownership and management of the liquor industry, and the French government's ban on absinthe.

Although temperance reform is commonly thought to have declined following the death of prohibition, new movements have simply taken on novel guises. American National Prohibition had been repealed only two years when a new self-help movement for habitual drunkards, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), grew from the chance meeting of two drunks in Akron, Ohio. AA has since become a worldwide movement, with popular manifestations or imitations in countries such as Mexico and Japan, and its twelve-step method has found application to a variety of habits and afflictions. Since the 1940s, academics following in the footsteps of E. M. Jellinek at the former Yale (University) Center of Alcohol Studies have taken a leading part in alcohol research and policy advice. Employers have continued to offer intervention in their workers' personal habits through "employee assistance programs." Both government policies and new organizations such as Mothers against Drunk Driving and Students against Destructive Decisions have focused on preventing or punishing drunken driving.

Women have often played key roles in temperance reform. In the United States, although women made up a large proportion of the membership of early temperance societies, they generally worked under male leadership. This began to change during the 1850s with the founding of the Independent Order of Good Templars, which soon became an international organization in which women in theory, and sometimes in practice, held equal status with male members. Women definitely seized the initiative in American temperance reform, however, in 1873–1874, when tens of thousands of women undertook nonviolent direct action against retail liquor dealers, using mass marches and public prayer and song. In the aftermath of the Women's Temperance Crusade, the national Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded, and it soon became the largest organization of American women. Through the visit of an American activist from the Crusade the British Women's Temperance Association, Britain's first national women's temperance society, was established in 1876.

American and British women temperance activists soon began to extend their movement across the world, leading to the establishment in 1884 of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU). Although it was always controlled by American and British women, the WWCTU made temperance for the first time an international movement. Through this vehicle advocacy of other issues, such as peace and women's enfranchisement, was also spread.

Despite the common belief that failure of the various national prohibition schemes ended its impact, in fact temperance reform has exerted far-reaching influence upon consumption patterns, in large part because of its protean character and ability to adapt to diverse national cultures. Examples of its adaptability include AA in Roman Catholic Mexico, which in 1997 held the world's second largest number of local chapters; the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart, an Irish Catholic society that at its peak in 1960 enrolled one-sixth of the Irish population and also attracted members in other countries; and the Danshukai societies in Japan, which have altered AA practices to fit Japanese culture. In the older industrialized countries at the outset of the twenty-first century, overall per capita consumption of alcohol was declining from peaks reached during the late twentieth century, and spirits and sometimes wine were being replaced in public preference by less potent beers, even in societies with long traditions of wine drinking. Nevertheless, rising consumption in the developing world, especially in China and India, presents new challenges to one of the world's historically most influential social movements.